Victor and Kate enjoy a drink at Manchester's Cuba Cafe

Spent many happy hours this week with my friends Victor and Kate. Victor Rodriguez Nuñez is a leading Cuban poet, and his wife Kate Hedeen is a gifted translator of Latin American poetry.

Victor was here for the Manchester International Literature festival last autumn, and liked it so much that he wanted to show Kate around. Plus, Kate is a huge fan of The Smiths, who provided the soundtrack to her early life in Portland, Oregon. So naturally we had to take the Smiths Tour of Manchester, expertly provided by Craig of Manchester Music Tours.

Kate and Craig: a visit to the Shrine!

We had a wonderful morning exploring everything from the Free Trade Hall to the Salford Lads’ Club and the famous Iron Bridge of the song. Craig was a fine, friendly guide (as well as being drummer with the renowned Inspiral Carpets) and we came away fully educated about Morrissey, the Smiths and the whole Manchester music scene.

We also enjoyed a few other quintessentially Mancunian delights – dinner at Mr Thomas’s Chop House, drinks at the Peveril of the Peak pub, and (of course) I couldn’t resist taking Victor and Kate on Friday night up to the amazing Cuba Cafe, in Port Street,  Manchester’s small but glittering Cuban bar and club, where we had a couple of Cuba Libres made with real Havana Club rum and watched one of Michal’s excellent bachata classes. I must get along there and improve my bachata dancing next week.

The famous Iron Bridge: to think I drove past it every day and never knew...

Kate paid Manchester what I take to be the ultimate compliment, saying that to her it felt like a Latin American city – gritty but friendly, hugely mixed and cosmopolitan, creative and non-touristy. A thoroughly happy few days with two close friends who are also great literary artists and a link back to my beloved Cuba. They’ve gone now but they’ll definitely be back for more.  I miss them already.

We went to see Wilko Johnson at the Manchester Academy. Wilko has a unique guitar style that blends what used to be called  ’lead’ and ‘rhythm’ – basically, he plays both at once in a percussive, economical way that owes something to Chuck Berry (and before her to Sister Rosetta Tharpe – see my post on her from way back) but is really all his own.

Wilko’s name may not mean much to you if you’re under 40 but he is still remembered as the star attraction of a sensational rhythm and blues band called Dr Feelgood back in the 1970s – just before the punk era dawned. Wilko was famous for the way he would go whizzing around the stage while he played – he never seemed to keep still and he would slide and tear around as if he was on skates, with a weird hypnotic glare on his face.

More recently the band - and Wilko above all – have been the subject of a fascinating film by Julien Temple called Oil City Confidential about the band, its history and the highly individual Wilko, who is a natural star – quoting Shakespeare and Milton fluently (he read English at Newcastle under my old friend Robert Woof, later curator of Dove Cottage – another crazy genius), demonstrating his highly personal guitar technique, and climbing onto the roof of his house in Canvey Island, Essex, where he has a high-grade astronomical telescope. In fact, he’s such an expert that there’s a Facebook group campaigning for him to take over on The Sky at Night when Patrick Moore finally has to retire!

Amanda and I had a quick chat with Wilko in the dressing room and he told us that he’s now got a solar telescope, which has darkened lenses so you can look directly at the sun, so he’s able to watch the solar flares erupting.

But mainly we listened to Wilko and his band performing a classic set of blues numbers and Dr Feelgood songs.  Exciting, energising and great fun.  And if you want to meet one of British rock’s great characters, or learn about a key episode in British popular culture, or just see a fine documentary film which I guarantee you’ll enjoy, do get hold of Oil City Confidential .

The Manor and one corner of the gardens

One of the things I love most is the connection between places and writing, so it was a treat yesterday to visit The Manor at Hemingford Grey, near Huntingdon, which is the setting for Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe series of children’s books.

The weather was awful - it rained and rained – and it was a 162-mile drive each way, but it was worth it. The occasion was a family party held at occasional, irregular intervals every few years: my grandfather was the brother of Lucy Boston’s mother (to put it another way, my mother’s Aunt Polly was Lucy Boston’s mother), which I think makes us second cousins, though I’m not sure. So there we were with a crowd of other relatives, close and distant, to explore the house, and talk, and just be in a magical place.

The Knight's Room: built about 1130 and alive with atmosphere (picture from the Green Knowe website)

Tolly's Bedroom, complete with rocking horse (picture from the Green Knowe website)

The rain stopped long enough for us to explore the beautiful gardens with their old scented roses, mock-orange and wonderful topiary, and to wander by the river that flows past with its swans floating calmly on the green current.

St Christopher - the statue is at the side of the house

The rooms are just as depicted in the books, with the toys, the rocking horse, the witch-ball, the quilts and a galaxy of drawings and paintings and other art works, including the beautiful original illustrations and cover-paintings for the books, which were done by the late Peter Boston, son of Lucy Boston and husband of Diana Boston who lives there now.

The house and gardens are open to the public quite often: for details and other information about the house, the books and their story, you can go to www.greenknowe.co.uk

Albert Camus: goalkeeper. In fact played in Algeria at a high level as a youngster before revolutionising the world of Philosophy with the French Existentialist movement. The classic Camus quote: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.”

Pope John Paul II: goalkeeper. Obviously not while holding the position of head of the Catholic Church, but apparently played in goal at university.

Luciano Pavarotti: yes, a bit hard to believe, but perhaps the big man wasn’t always so big… Reported to have had a shot at a professional career with Italian football side Modena. Had to settle for performing at the World Cup during half time instead!

This goalkeeping blog (http://ministryofglove.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/famous-goalkeepers/) even claims that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a goalkeeper, but I’m not sure if I buy that…
A fan of both Camus and goalkeeping – it is a friend of mine, who runs a website that sells goalkeeper gloves and kit, TheGoalkeeperCo.com, who makes these claims about goalkeepers being cleverer than the average footballer. As a goalkeeper, he may be slightly biased. So does anybody know of any other good examples of famous non-professional goalkeepers?

Sister Rosetta, pioneer of rock'n'roll

Sister Rosetta, who started as a 1930s Gospel singer from the USA’s deep South, graduated by way of nightclub singing at the Cotton Club and touring work as a jazz, blues and gospel soloist, to being a pioneer of Rock’n'Roll and one of the all-time great figures. yet she’s been almost forgotten.

Listening to her wonderfully percussive guitar style you could hear at once how much Chuck Berry learned from her; and the archive footage of her hugely energetic performances, full of movement, power and infectious delight, made it quite clear that she was a – if not the – key figure in the transition from Black gospel music to Rock. Popular music history needs to be rewritten to put this lady at the centre!

But the most amazing thing for me was to learn that, when her career (like that of many blues musicians in the US) had stalled in the early ’60s, she was invited to the UK by Chris Barber of all people – and that Granada TV invited her to perform at the disused Chorlton-cum-Hardy railway station about five minutes from where I live in Manchester. Just take a look at the clips! And more important, listen!

The rationale was something to do with freight trains and all that – the vague mythology of train tracks and the Blues. Whatever. Granada decked the old station out as a kind of Wild West scene, with a fake ‘Chorltonville’ sign which they must have thought sounded American. They put the band on one platform and the audience on the other, and delivered Sister Rosetta in a horse-drawn carriage. The horse is a typical piebald cob – a ‘gypsy horse’ of the kind you can see by the hundred at Appleby Fair every year. Her affection for the horse is typical of this immensely sweet and loving woman who seems to radiate kindness and warmth with every ounce of her being. Good to know, then, that the UK tour put Sister Rosetta back on the map and she remained a big star in Europe at least until her death.

We all knew Chorlton was special (Quentin Crisp died here, Badly Drawn Boy lives here, and of course it’s full of wonderful creative people) – but now we know it has a place in Rock’n'Roll history too. The station is about to reopen as a Metrolink stop. Maybe there ought to be a blue plaque on that platform.

You may not be at the front of the picture: quite possibly you were just walking by or standing a few yards behind, when someone aimed the camera at someone else, and you just happened to get into the frame. Have you ever been ‘tagged’ on Facebook in a picture you didn’t even know had been taken? if you’re under about 35, the answer’s probably yes.

Did you get any spam in your email today? If so, someone you don’t want to have your address has already got it, and will pass it on. Did you send an email today? If so, the recipient can forward it to someone else without your knowledge.

What has all this got to do with Wikileaks? More than you might think. The fuss being made about the site by governments misses what I believe is the real point. If Wikileaks gets suppressed, in a matter of months (or weeks or days) other websites will spring up doing the same thing.  Now that, thanks to computers and the internet, any document can be copied in a microsecond and sent around the world in a few seconds more, it is simply becoming impossible to keep anything secret.

Anywhere you go now there will be someone with a mobile phone, video camera or digital camera – usually all three rolled into one. When I was in New Orleans last spring, my friend Ken took a few pictures – as I thought. Once I was home, I found that he’d in fact made and edited a video with clips showing many of the things I’d done, and the people I’d met, during my visit. I don’t object at all, in fact I’m pleased. But I didn’t know it was being done, and by the time I did it was on YouTube. I’ve also become quite used to turning up as a bit-part player in other videos turn up on YouTube and elsewhere – as well as being tagged in photos I never knew were taken. As Ken says succinctly, ‘Video is the new paper.’ I’ve slotted in the video above in case you’re interested.

The accusations of torture at Abhu Ghraib came out because people with mobile phones took pictures. Now the police routinely check out Facebook for evidence against criminals, and they quite often find it.

Almost none of us is untraceable now: your bank card, your mobile phone, your store cards, and the countless CCTV cameras in the street mean you can be traced just about anywhere. The truth is that to a great extent privacy, like copyright and for the same reasons, is already dead. Government secrecy is going the same way. It’s simply too easy for things to get out.

Whether this will lead to better or worse things, I have no idea. It’s only just starting, and time will tell.  But the bigger issue behind Wikileaks is simply this: nothing can be kept secret any more, least of all a document. What happens to Julian Assange is not going to change that. Rather than being pro or con him, maybe we need to think about that bigger picture.

Artist Peter Roebuck (right, in red) and friend Peter Thomas at Arison

Just back from the opening of an excellent new exhibition of paintings by Peter Roebuck at the Arison Gallery in Chorlton, Manchester.

Peter has I think made a unique and very distinctive contribution to the English vision of landscape – though he also paints still life, people and many other subjects. But to me, landscape is the heart of his work and he has worked with enormous dedication and integrity over many years to refine a most unusual way of seeing, and showing, the world.

The hallmark of Roebuck’s work is a combination of radiant intensity of light with a quality of visual softness, created sometimes by mist, sometimes by frost, sometimes by distance or sunset light, but always conveying a sense of stillness and fascination. Perhaps that’s the outcome of the very close and long-continued observation which you sense has gone into these paintings.

Guitarist Bob Jones (of Bourbon Street Preachers and other bands) and friend Bernie enjoy the paintings

Working in both oil and watercolour, Peter Roebuck returns often to certain favourite subjects: the waters, and the shores, of Morecambe Bay, the lesser-known areas of Lakeland, and the Mersey Valley, centring on Chorlton Meadows not far from where he lives. The radiance of his colours and the intriguing simplifications of landscape forms, which make the places portrayed appear more, not less, fascinating, mean that these paintings are haunting and, in their way, inimitably strange as well as beautiful. The longer you look at them the more interesting they get. 

If you’re in South Manchester between now and 9 October, and have even a few minutes to spare, do go and take a look, to see fine work by a greatly underrated and totally individual artist.

 The Arison Gallery is at 512 Wilbraham Road, Chorlton, Manchester M21 9AW  (0161 881 6734).

Simon Bolivar: hero of Latin American independence

Bolivar was a great man in his way, and is a hero in several South American countries. With no military training, he became a brilliant strategist and led five countries – Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia – to independence. His great dream was a ‘united states of the Americas’ where all American countries would form a free federation.

Bolivar died of TB. But anyone who knows anything about Chavez can see where all this is leading. The ‘tests’ carried out on Bolivar’s body will reveal – guess what? That he was poisoned, either by the USA or more likely by the Colombians. Chavez has been having a border dispute with Colombia (which claims Colombian terrorists are being allowed to take refuge in Venezuela), and he will use the ‘results’ for propaganda, claiming that the Colombians poisoned Latin America’s greatest hero.

Of course no one will believe it. But it will give Chavez a chance to make trouble. Having failed a couple of years ago in his bid to pass a referendum that would let him be President for life, he’s been looking for other causes to take up, and a quarrel with Colombia over Bolivar will be one of them.

When I was in Caracas, there was a big exhibition in the City Hall there called ‘Caracas, Cradle of Liberty’. The building bore huge banners featuring the faces of Bolivar, Miranda (another nineteenth-century hero of the independence struggle) and – guess who? Hugo Chavez.

Chavez has been hijacking Bolivar’s name for a long time, calling his demagogic rule ‘Bolivarian Socialism’. By now, he probably believes that he is Bolivar. Rather than a socialist, he’s simply the latest in a long line of self-aggrandizing political bosses – what the Latin Americans call a caudillo.

It’s a disgrace that he’s dishonouring Bolivar in this way. And Bolivar’s family, who haven’t been consulted, are furious.  But it’s just part of the sad process by which political egoists descend into lunacy on the way to finally imploding.

Having written this, I probably won’t be allowed into Venezuela again. But having spent time in Caracas, which has become the most dangerous city in Latin America outside the border areas of Mexico, as well as the most polluted and traffic-ridden, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem. What Venezuela needs is Bolivar’s wide vision and generosity of spirit, not fake excuses for more tension.

Castle Crag is full of caves and chasms

Back to the Lakes last week to give a talk to a group of Swiss students, mostly MA students studying English Romanticism. After a great day touring Dove Cottage and walking up Sour Milk Gill to Easedale Tarn I stayed on and went for a scramble around the slopes of Castle Crag near Keswick.

Slate cavern hewn at the base of Castle Crag

The Crag doesn’t look huge from the Grange-Seatoller path but it’s really a ridge, much larger and more intricate than it looks, full of gulleys, crags, fissures and caves. Its slopes on the east side are thickly forested and you can disappear in there for hours and get happily lost. You can spend hours and days exploring its mysteries. I took a long time trying to locate Millican Dalton’s cave but didn’t succeed. I’ve tried and failed before. If anyone out there can give me precise directions to find it, please get in touch. 

Red squirrel explores dense pine forest around the Crag

I spent a while meditating in a grassy natural balcony half way up one of the crags and became aware of rapid zig-zaggy movements in a nearby tree. Turning gently that way I soon saw a pair of red squirrels chasing each other madly in a pine tree, tearing in spiral paths up and down the trunk. Managed to ease the camera out and when they finally tired of the game one of them ambled over towards me. This was about its closest point.

Helm Crag from a How Foot bedroom

Amanda came up and joined me for the weekend, which we spent at How Foot Lodge in Grasmere. They gave us a room with a wonderful foliage-fringed window looking straight out to Helm Crag. They told me they have an unusual number of free rooms this year owing to the World Cup so now’s your chance to make a booking on impulse at this lovely and relatively inexpensive hotel: www.howfoot.co.uk

Bluebells cover the lower slopes of Loughrigg Fell

The weather was kind and we had a few great walks, including the circuit around Grasmere and Rydal Water. Sheets of bluebells were still floating their intense colour on the slopes of Loughrigg, making a wonderful contrast with the dead russet of the bracken.

No, it isn't a Julian Cooper painting: the rock contemplates its own face in the water

At the Rydal Cavern I disregarded the National Trust’s warning notice (what are the odds, really, of a chunk of rock dropping from the roof  exactly at the moment I’m standing directly underneath?) to go into this, one of my favourite spaces, and contemplate the mirrorimage of the hewn rock in the still floodwater. Of course I advise you not to do this, and if you go in there it’s at your own risk. Don’t sue me if you get flattened.

The Swinside Inn: traditional Newlands pub with great food

I’d had an email, totally unexpected, to say that the Cumbria Blue Badge Guides were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of their Association in the Swinside Inn, at Newlands near Keswick, where the organisation was originally set up. They were going to have a plaque to commemorate the occasion and they wanted me to unveil it!

What's the collective noun for a set of Blue Badgers?

I found this pretty hard to believe because I don’t see myself as the sort of person who goes around unveiling plaques. But it wasn’t a hoax. It turned out that the Guides (and no, they’re not Girl Guides, they’re the accredited tourist guides who take people on all kinds of tours, big and small, around the towns, villages, historic sites and mountains of Cumbria) have been using my Literary Guide to the Lake District as a resource, year in and year out. So they’d decided to invite me to do the business.

A clean slate. Plenty of space for the next 20 years

I met the Guides and their friends and partners, led by Nicky Godfrey-Evans, at the Swinside Inn around 6 pm. After drinks and talk, and a photo session outside the Inn, we got the plaque unveiled. It’s a fine slab of Cumberland slate, engraved with the ‘Blue Badge’ design and details of the date and the Association it commemorates.

I quickly found that the Guides are a remarkable group of people, from all sorts of backgrounds. Their training is rigorous and they’re all enthusiasts for Cumbria (and other parts of the North-West) with their own special interests and expertise. They take on everything from demanding fell walks to coach tours and (as you’d expect in the Lakes) every one is a strong and genial personality. So the bar was buzzing with energy, ideas and laughter.

What you see when you wake up

 The Swinside Inn is under new management and George and Judy treated us to a superb meal – absolutely first rate traditional Cumbrian food with a good range of choice. I stayed resolutely mainstream and I couldn’t have done better. The steak-and-ale pie was quite definitely the best I have ever tasted – tender, beautifully cooked and full of flavour; and the sticky toffee pudding (I had it with ice cream) was utterly delicious, and a satisfyingly huge helping as well.

I stayed overnight and was greeted with a fabulous view up the Newlands Valley towards Causey Pike in golden morning sunshine. Fabulous.

Seathwaite Farm, heading for Grains Gill

With the weather so good I wasn’t going to stay in the valley, so I went up to Seathwaite and walked up Grains Gill, then climed Scafell Pike. The air on the summit was icy but the rain and cloud held off and there was the whole of the Lake District, the Solway and the west coast with the Isle of Man on the horizon: everything misty green, gold and purple under a radiant blue sky.

Stockley Bridge, towards Seathwaite

If you’re walking in Newlands, do check out the Swinside Inn. And let’s hope for lots more fresh, sunny days like that as spring turns into summer.

It was a lesirely drive home, not least because some sheep were being moved from field to field at Lodore. They got

Looking back from Grains Gill

away from the dog and spilled all along the road, up side paths and into other people’s fields. One driver (not me) got out to stand and watch. Finally the shepherd came down with his dog. Unabashed, he took one look at the motorist and remarked, pointing at the other side of the road, ‘If ye’d've stood theer, ye’d've done sum gud.’ Quintessential Cumbrian remark!

Pedestrians made it a leisurely journey home