Distance

This painting is An Italianate Evening Landscape, by Jan Both, a Dutch artist of the 17^th century. More of that later.

Between the ages of five and seven years, I lived in Kinglassie, a coalmining village in central Fife. Every weekday, my brother Tony (Tbone) and I would get the bus to and from our school in the neighbouring village of Bowhill, three miles away. One day we lost our bus fare home, or perhaps had not been given it due to an oversight on the part of our parents. In any case, we found ourselves unable to get the bus back to Kinglassie at four o’ clock when school finished. I was five years old and Tony was ten. As far as I was concerned, he knew everything that was worth knowing and was the ultimate arbiter on all decisions which had to be made. He decided we should walk home across The Craigs, two and a half miles of open country, a shorter distance than by road. We did so, without incident. When we got home, our parents were not particularly pleased that we had not arrived on the bus and had caused them considerable worry, but I think they saw the justice of our position that we had little option but to walk home. I suspect that we weren’t all that much later home than if we had got the bus.

You would think that this early experience would give me a certain robust attitude to distance from home, but it did not. We moved to Cowdenbeath when I was seven years old, and although I cherish the memories of roaming the countryside to the south, known as The Moss, climbing trees, falling in ditches, and exploring wrecked coalmining installations, I was always nervous about venturing more than an hour or so’s walk from home. And I used to have dreams about exploring the great Asian land mass and finding myself terrifying distances away from civilisation (why are so many of our dreams about journeys?).

When I was in my early 20’s, I started to get interested in the visual arts and spent a lot of time in art galleries. To be honest, I may also have thought that such places might be suitable venues to meet arty and liberated girls (if so, I was wrong). One genre that particularly moved me was that of the summer landscapes of the great Dutch artists of the 17^th century, like the one above, with distance fading into golden sunlight. They reminded me so much of August afternoons when I was a child, out on the Moss, perhaps looking from an elevated vantage point at somewhere at a distance that I could not hope to reach, primarily because I felt that if I did go there, I could not hope to be home before night.

British landscape artists caught up a century or two later (this is my impression, art historians might well put me right on this), but anyway, I did wonder as a young adult why I found these afternoon sunny landscapes so moving. I think that part of it was the idea of a distance from which one might not be able to return. In conversation I remember pompously referring to this as ‘the tragedy of distance’. How pretentious is that? And that brings me to another point. I feel, as Thomas Pynchon once said about his younger self, a bit ambivalent about the person I used to be. How would I feel about allowing that young man to borrow my bicycle, or even about buying him a pint and chatting about the old days? This young fellow who showed off his knowledge some time before taking the trouble to acquire it, who spent too much time at his computer at work and in Mather’s Bar outside of work, would probably grate on me.

To get back to these beautiful landscape paintings and the distance fading into the afternoon sun, a couple of years ago, I realised that all the pompous bollocks about the tragedy of distance was stepping round the fact that distance is a very powerful metaphor for ageing. As a result I wrote the following poem.

A gap in the trees, a view across the plain.

Golden on the distant river, sunlight

Of an August afternoon begins to wane.

The children hear the wings of coming night.

 

Time to go home: three miles over woodland,

Scrub and field. We must get home for tea.

At sinks and hobs and ovens, mothers stand

To feed us all, to shield the family.

 

Fifty years on, we see the same sun glow.

We turn and look to home. The fading light

Tells us it is time to return, but no.

We’ve gone too far to get back before night.

 

The poem is a bit clunky, the second verse in particular, but I think it gets to the bottom of why I find paintings like the one above so moving.

Where is all this going? Well, nowhere, really. However, I should also report that in my thirties, forties and fifties I made up for my fear of distance by travelling a lot for work. To cheer us up, I am reminded of a conference I once attended, one of an annual series of conferences on cancer screening in Asia (because of my work with cancer screening researchers and practitioners in Taiwan, India, Singapore and elsewhere in Asia, I seem to be regarded as an honorary Asian). This particular one was held in Khon Khaen in Thailand. The conference dinner was a buffet in the garden of the hotel in which we were billeted. At first, it appeared that we were having a dry evening but after vociferous representations from myself and the Chinese contingent, the hotel staff brought out some crates of beer.

Once we had had at least one round of buffet-fuelled gluttony and a drink or two, a microphone and PA system appeared, and an announcement was made that the Indonesian contingent would sing us a song. They did so, were applauded enthusiastically, and then the self-appointed master of ceremonies introduced the Bangla Deshi contingent. They gave us a quick ditty, and then it was the turn of the Taiwan delegates.

At this point, the rather poorly oiled wheels in my mind started to turn, and it occurred to me that I was the only British participant, and would therefore be called upon to give a solo performance at some point in the next few minutes. I racked my brains for what to do. When I was called to perform, I gave them Auld Lang Syne.

I was completely unprepared for the positive response. When I had finished, they were punching the air, cheering ecstatically, clapping their hands fit to cause self-harm. I hadn’t realised how all-pervasive is Auld Lang Syne in so many cultures. The Bangla Deshis told me that they traditionally sang it on graduation day. The Indonesians on the other hand sung it at the other end of the university career, in fresher’s week. Anyway, my fear of public humiliation was unfounded.

There is no moral to all the above. What I would say is that when as seems likely in the near future we will no longer be confined to the area a couple of miles around our homes, don’t postpone. Do stuff while you have the chance, while you still have the possibility of getting home before night.