Achieving Some Degree of Happiness

 

Seriously Gorgeous Charlie in a 
new bath robe

 I have been struck by the recent transformation of an acquaintance who has seemed to be perennially unhappy. She is autistic I think, and rather prone to unwise outbursts of opinion which would have been better left unsaid. She has upset fellow players in a games group, in a row over her imaginary, offended interpretation of harmless remarks, lightly made by others, with no intended criticism implied. She has lost touch with her children and from occasional remarks she makes, has clearly had a difficult and often sad life with failed relationships and uncomfortable, often angry, situations which have not been resolved. In addition, she has serious health issues and probably, insufficient income. I paint a sad picture and yet, this same woman is constantly helping others in kind and different ways and is often generous to others. She arranges little celebrations for the group and is careful to include everyone. But she told me recently that she awoke every day feeling unhappy, not looking forward to the day ahead and had nothing good about her life.

But there has been a transformation wrought. She has bought a most delightful, friendly, loving little dog who is young and appears to treat her as his most precious person!! He pines if she disappears temporarily; he worships at her altar with unwavering devotion and zeal and constantly reinforces the impression of her huge value to him. They give each other unconditional love. It does not take a psychologist to recognise the cause of her changed attitude and confidence; she is happy, appreciated uncritically and happily self-confident. The simplicity of this remedy belies its effectiveness in this case; perhaps a little too early to pass on this information to NHS staff and one can spot possible downsides like untimely death of afore-mentioned puppy etc.

However, the whole experience has caused me [again!] to ponder the mysterious but greatly valued state of happiness. A state of constant elation is neither desirable nor probably attainable nor is it indicative of psychological good health. We all experience negative events and feelings, but alongside these, we need a counter balance of positive experiences and feelings. I want ‘a good life’, that is, to live a fulfilled life, with rewarding relationships, recognition of my strong attributes and success in, at least, some endeavours. I need to feel good about myself first then want to show tolerance and give assistance and attention to others I meet. Not in grand gestures generally but in quotididien, small-scale yet life-affirming ways of being a better friend or neighbour.

I notice that, almost every day, I wake up happy, looking forward to the day. It has been like that for a long time and seems to be a product of my personality, but I am now noticing that, with the frailty of ageing, comes the reduced ability to be occupied in the various activities which generate pleasure and interest, particularly intellectual interest. The result of that is in increased time alone. And there’s the rub.
One has to work a little harder to find interests in the home or office, between visits to talks, films, discussions, because the demands of outside interests, activities, meetings, can gradually outstrip the available energy to attend them and so reduce participation. So, effort and determination are needed!

However, the degree of happiness any person experiences or generates, is within that person’s power to change through how he chooses to act and think. There are happiness-inducing activities and attitudes which happy people do or have, naturally, some of which any person can decide to add to his own repertoire. The following list is not prescriptive nor is it necessary to try to Do It All.

1. Cultivate optimism. The hardest perhaps to manage but the most worthwhile. Practice is required, i.e. hard work, and as much self-belief as can be gathered or visualised.

2. Express genuine gratitude to others for even the smallest remarks, deeds, kindnesses. Recognising the generosity of others gives real pleasure to the recipient and encourages altruistic behaviour in everyone.

3. Practice acts of targeted kindnesses and also random acts of thoughtfulness. This encourages the attention to move beyond oneself and to centre however briefly, on others.

4

. Do not obsess however on what others think of you, or do to you; behaviour towards you which you find upsetting or annoying, can be considered as objectively as possible. Negative events and opinions can make us stronger. Learn to forgive and forget.

5. Cultivate friends; join clubs or activities through which others with similar interests can be found and friendships develop. Make time for friends you already have and give them love and support.

6. Make efforts to truly appreciate things you do every day, like the usual lunch; a walk in the park; a regular activity like shopping. It is too easy to repetitively do the daily mundane chores or activities without consciously appreciating aspects of them, or others, involved. Look for connections with others, however fleeting. I have become a friend of a young man, half my age, who sells tribal rugs on Bury Market. We have a shared interest, though his is much more professional and informed than mine but we have a connection. That is very important to older people particularly and I look forward to our weekly chat.

                   

7. Find joy in spiritual areas like art, culture, religion. This nurtures the inner ‘you’ and contributes to your being a more interesting person to meet. It also generates positive self-feelings.

8. Physical exercise. This sounds formidable but there are degrees! I now only walk regularly and early in the day, for perhaps 30-40 minutes. But I do it every day! In earlier years, I swam for half an hour, early in the day, every day, for instance and walked for an hour most days.

9. Mental exercise. This list is long! Play games; do Su

 Maybe a walk in the park

doku or crosswords; do emails on a laptop or research a word, a meaning, aspects of daily news; organise; volunteer if you can; join clubs like book clubs etc; read every day. The list is endless. Composing this blog takes a lot of thought and mental effort to accomplish and each time I do it, I encounter positive feelings after often arduous mental verbal searching and sorting! The fact that few people read it, is not important to me; the important goal is in the composition and the satisfaction experienced, post-publication!

Post Script Comment.

The person in the first paragraph has, in fact, found a friend perfect for her; her self-esteem is nourished; she wakes up happy, looking forward to her day; she is other-centred; she attracts much positive attention with her cute little friend.

The Old Oak

Mining village in North East England

The film, The Old Oak is the story of a village in the North East of England, where the mine has closed, and people feel deserted by the system. Indeed, it has suffered forty years of political and economic disenfranchisement, virtually traumatised by the State. Many young people have left and what was once a thriving and proud community, struggles to keep old values alive while there is growing anger and resentment, plus a lack of hope. Shops are boarded up, money is scarce, divisions over the 1984 miners’ strike linger. The fact that houses there are dirt cheap and available makes it an ideal location for these to be bought and rented out for profit, to give space to newly-arrived Syrian refugees. But the locals are angry at the loss of value to them, of their houses, many bought, after long struggles, as a protection for old age and possible ill health in the future.

T. J Ballantyne and his lifeline,
Marra the little dog.

Pub landlord, T. J., tries in vain to correct the 
errant K which constantly collapses; a metaphor for
The Old Oak which is in a seriously poor state.

Exhausted Syrian refugees arriving in England

The Syrians have lost everything; most do not speak English and know nothing of English life. Their terrified arrival in this poverty-stricken community is greeted with outright hostility, racism and incomprehension. There is still a pub, the Old Oak, run by a former miner, T J Ballantyne, played by Dave Turner, but it is on its last legs, kept afloat by a bunch of disgruntled and opinionated regulars who seem to hate most of their world and all people outside it. T. J. is not a happy man; he is divorced, depressed and his only son no longer speaks to him; he manages to keep the Old Oak going as it 

Yara busy with her restored camera

gradually falls apart, but he is increasingly desperate and broke.

Into this maelstrom arrive the unexpected Syrians, one of whose number, the self-confident and articulate Yara, has a precious camera, gifted to her by her father, now missing in Syria. She loves to photograph the people around her but swiftly meets violent hostility from the locals at a ‘fucking raghead’ taking their photos without permission. Her camera is swiftly smashed, to her utmost sadness. The struggling publican, T. J., a decent man, is horrified and tries to help her; this is the beginning of a slow and careful friendship, but one which also alienates many of the villagers, whose support he needs.

An unlikely friendship develops cautiously between
Yara and T. J.

Ken Loach who directed this film, is one of my filmic heroes and I am one among millions if fans, I think. He always works with screenwriter, Paul Laverty and takes on current issues and stories often avoided by the mainstream. The Old Oak is the third film of painful and unfashionable socio-artistic subjects; his first in the trio, I, Daniel Blake, dealt with searing honesty, the brutality of benefit sanctions and the desperation fueling the rise of food banks; the second, Sorry We Missed You, the serfdom of the gig economy, and this third, The Old Oak, refugees housed all over the country being abused and attacked by locals radicalised by social media and poverty.

Ken Loach
Always, compassion for the oppressed.

While most of the working class in this bereft village behave atrociously, Loach presents them sympathetically; they are seen as much victims of market forces and global instability as the dazed Syrians. Loach is now in his upper eighties and was rumoured to be considering retirement ten years ago but mediocre ideological governments since that time, have challenged and enraged him, inducing this late burst of energy and passion in a surge of socially incisive films of great power. Perhaps his last effort.

Post Script

Loach always tries to use amateurs, not professional actors and most of the cast is amateur, like Dave Turner who plays T. J. He was a fireman not interested in being an actor and lacking any confidence in his ability to be on a film set even! Ebla Mari who plays Yara, is a theatre teacher from the Golan Heights, on the border of Syria. She is culturally and emotionally Syrian and has family there but she has never been. She says, “I am not a refugee; I live under occupation in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. This film is the first time I have met Syrians who actually live in Syria.”

Local boys envious of the second-hand bike delivered
by T. J. to one of the Syrian girls

The Emergence of the Railways

 

Rishi Sunak

HS2 today: sleek, modern, truncated.

I am inspired to write about railways because of my disbelief and anger at Rishi Sunak’s cancellation of the Birmingham to Manchester section of HS2. This could be said to be the most important part, so far, of this ill-fated project and Sunak’s decision provokes contrasting responses. There is mine; anger and disbelief that he is sentencing the North of the country to a continuing impotence for the rest of this century; and heartfelt approval at this apparent saving of millions of pounds, with the saved millions allegedly destined to be spent on ‘levelling up’! It also occurred to me that the Government did not chiefly appreciate the inspiring story of how the railways developed and the significance at the time of their arrival and growth. Over a short period of two or three decades, the whole social and transport map of the entire country totally changed and considerable economic development resulted.

This is the Kentish estate which escaped the coming
of the railways across its land in the early 18th century

I remembered a friend once telling me of how her great great [possibly] great uncle had been hugely exercised in keeping the railway people at bay in the mid-eighteenth century, when part of his estate had been under threat of having the new-fangled railway line run across His Land. The imagined horror of it all!! By mysterious and unseen connections with Someone in Power, this desecration had been avoided and all had been left intact to hunting and landscape contemplation. Clearly, he felt that he had won the battle!

It is difficult now to imagine life before railways but salutary to trace the development of transport as railways grew from primitive beginnings. Pre-industrial economies were burdened with poor 

Transport by water, This illustrated the hell of the urban
pre-industrial landscape

    transport links which were major obstacles to            economic growth. However, late seventeenth and      early eighteenth centuries welcomed major                improvements to transport systems in England an      Wales that facilitated early industrialisation and          regional specialisation; transport by water                  provided speedy and relatively cheap carriage. 

17th century travel. An early version of the
stage coach for hardy souls.

"As by water carriage, a more extensive market is opened up to every sort of industry than what land carriage alone can afford, so it is upon the sea coast, and along the banks of navigable rivers that industry of every kind naturally begins to subdivide and improve itself.” Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations. 1776. Six or eight men, by water carriage, could transport, in the same time, the same quantity of goods between London and Edinburgh, as fifty broad-wheeled wagons and one hundred horses, attended by a hundred men.

The reddish brown network is a representation of 
4000 miles of canals situated chiefly in the industrial
Midlands.

During this time, the length of navigable rivers was extended and the second half of the eighteenth century saw the construction of a network of canals. Coal, which hitherto had been used only up to a dozen miles from the local coal mine or nearest navigable river, could now be sent nationwide, though coastal transport remained the most popular form until the railway age had become established. Major improvements in road conditions led to the introduction of turnpikes, toll receipts from which were ploughed back into road improvements. By the mid eighteenth century, greatly improved highways meant the dominant mode of travel was by stage coach, for those who could afford it, and horse back [and walking] continued for those who could not.

Wagonway

Simultaneously, wagon-ways deveIoped, almost always in conjunction with coal. These were simply straight and parallel rails of timber on which carts with flanged iron wheels were drawn by horses, enabling several wagons to be moved simultaneously. One of the earliest was the Wollaton Wagon-way in Nottinghamshire to carry coal for Sir Francis Willoughby; it began in 1603/4. But by 1641 railed roads began to be used in Durham, [the Tanfield Wagon-way] and developed nationally thereafter over the following century and a half during which time, modifications and improvements to tracks continued. The early wooden railways were improved on in 1793 when Benjamin Outram constructed a mile long tramway with L-shaped cast iron rails. These were gradually superceded by various design improvements until John Birkenshaw introduced a method of rolling wrought iron rails which were used from then onwards. In 1807, the very first passenger service was introduced by the Swansea and Mumbles Railway at Oystermouth

Hedley's Puffing Billy

using horse-drawn carriages on an existing tramline. In 1813, the famous Puffing Billy made its appearance; its mechanisms were the latest design by William Hedley and Timothy Hackwood; and the more sophisticated movement meant that the wheels were coupled allowing better traction. George Stephenson’s improved version a year later led to his appointment as Engineer for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1821. It was his reappraisal of the route initially, which led to his suggestion to utilise steam haulage instead of the intended horse-drawn carriage. And also his idea to introduce passengers to the train. Opening on September 27^th 1825, Stephenson’s Locomotion 1 became the first locomotive-hauled public railway in the world.

Stephenson's Rocket: the  most advanced locomotive
of its day.

The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway
1830

In 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened. This set the pattern for the modern railway. It was the world’s first inner-city passenger railway and the first to have scheduled services and terminal stations as we know them today. Many of the first public railways were built as local rail links, operated by small private railway companies but, as railways expanded and grew in popularity, more lines were built, often with scant regard for their potential for traffic.

The Railway Station. Holt 

From 1840, came the biggest decade for railway growth; from the few ad hoc and scattered railway lines, grew a virtually complete network until the vast majority of towns had a railway connection, usually with attendant railway stations. 

One of my brothers, the ever-genial
Horace, born in November 1918,
a proud engine driver following years
as a fireman. A rail fireman, working as part of
a team with the driver, controlled the steam.
During World War 2, rail drivers and firemen
were exempt from serving in the Forces.

The Sycamore Gap Tree Tragedy

The Sycamore Gap Tree in its perfect ancient place

  “…..there is an old tree growing,

         a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself."

              The Sycamore by Wendell Berry.

After the inexplicable vandalism during the night of Sept 27

 

In an artistic poster design

The sycamore of the poem has managed to withstand fire, and age- and weather-damage, but alas, the recently-ravaged Sycamore Gap Tree, sometimes known as the Robin Hood tree, in Northumberland, is beyond remedy. It had proudly stood for 300 years, next to Hadrian’s Wall which has been a designated UNESCO World Heritage site since 1991, in a perfect dramatic dip in the landscape, a magnet for photographers and artists world-wide, and for both tourists and locals too. Indeed, it had assumed an almost mythical status as part of the cultural identity of north-east England; a place where lovers became engaged; first dates occurred; the bereaved went to grieve and remember; fond parents to celebrate their new baby; special family events were recalled; its image used countless times in newspapers and magazines and introduced to a much bigger audience after it featured in the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as the tryst meeting place for Robin and Maid Marion.

Helen-Ann Hartley, Bishop of Newcastle

Its huge emotional significance has been loudly proclaimed since the vandalism, and the consequent anger which erupted strongly when the tree was inexplicably and brutally felled during the night of September,27th, has been visceral. The Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, who quickly visited the site, said, “There’s a real sense of sadness in the air. It reminded me of the rawness of the landscape. It was just heartbreaking and almost unreal to see the tree felled.” 

 “I’m bereft,” said Dan Jackson, local historian and author of The Northumbrian" Unlike so many landmarks in the north-east –the Tyne Bridge, the Angel, Durham Cathedral – this was a beautiful living thing, perfectly situated in one of the world’s historic landscapes.” For locals, Sycamore Gap was as much a symbol of the north-east as the Angel of the North.

Historian Dan 
Jackson: author of
The Northumbrian

A sixteen year old boy has been arrested and subsequently released, while a 65 year old former lumberjack is still in custody, protesting innocence. The totally mystifying reason for the cutting down remains, amid the widespread anger and sense of loss. There are so many studies which testify to the proven efficacy for humans of being near to, beneath and among, trees. All point to the significant psychological benefits of walking through forests; indeed forest environments are expected to have very important roles in promoting
mental health in the future. ‘Forest bathing’, deliberately spending time among the woods, has been shown to help us deal with the strains and stresses of urban life.. 

In another recent study, walking among trees was

Forest bathing

shown to lower  people’s blood pressure, cortisol levels, pulse rates and sympathetic nervous system activity [related to stress] while increasing nervous system activity, [related to relaxation]. All of these physiological markers are tied to better heart health. As a child, I was inordinately fond of trees; it was an instinctive attraction and my sisters and I always played, every day, in the wood adjoining our garden. We were in a small gang of boys who seemed, in memory, to meet and play together every day for several years. Our meeting place was always ‘our wood‘ and our games centred on climbing trees, making dens, finding hiding places and spying, generally from trees, on others. It was the happiest of environments, one of my most enduring childhood images and, in retrospect, accidentally healing too.

Relaxation beneath trees. An instinctive pastime

The Robin Hood connection alluded to above, reminded me strongly of the Major Oak near Edwinstowe, Nottinghamshire, very near the area in which I grew up. This is even more venerable than the Sycamore Gap tree; it is around 1000 years old, quite probably the result of that distant planting, with several slim saplings planted so closely together that gradually they intertwined and grew into one huge whole. It has been hollow for hundreds of years, owing probably to a fungal infection; certainly there is a strong connection of this tree with Robin Hood and his merry men who were reputed to have hidden inside the hollow trunk to escape pursuers. I took my three, then very small, children to see the Major Oak, probably in the late 60s, and they, too, hid excitedly inside the great empty trunk, safe from the Sheriff of Nottingham! It was not hugely famous until 1760 when a Major Hayman Rooke described it in a book he published. The elderly tree was later named after him, the Major, and is not a tribute to its age or size! The Major Oak was voted England’s favourite tree in 2002 and in 2014 was awarded the title of Tree of The Year.

Needing assistance to survive at 1000 years of age
The Major Oak, near Edwinstowe, Notts
Tree of the Year 2014

There are innumerable written testimonies to the power and importance of trees, many of which are inspiring. I wish I knew the Sycamore Gap vandal in case any of the following were able to inspire him or shame him or cause him to pause and regret.

“Ancient trees are precious. There is little else on Earth that plays host to such a rich community of life within a single living organism.” Sir David Attenborough.

“Finland is officially the world’s happiest country. It is also 75 per cent forest. I believe these facts are related.” Matt Haig

“That each day I may walk unceasingly on the banks of my water, that my soul may repose on the branches of the trees which I planted, that I may refresh myself under the shadow of my sycamore.” Egyptian tomb inscription

“To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.” Richard Mabey

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air, that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.” Robert Louis Stevenson

“He that plants trees, loves others besides himself.” Thomas Fuller

Sherwood Forest
Home to the Major Oak

My sister, Esme, and I visiting
'our wood' in June 2017, a few 
months before her death.

Respect the tree