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I led workshops at the British Library2003-2019, on literature, language, art, history, and the culture of the book; and now teach the the English language at educational institutions, particularly the Bishopsgate Institute, online and in-person. I research language usage during the First World War, and lead the Languages and the First World War project. Author of Discovering Words, Discovering Words in the Kitchen, Evolving English Explored, Team Talk - sporting words & their origins, Trench Talk - the Language of the First World War (with Peter Doyle); How to Cure the Plague; The Finishing Touch; and Words and the First World War; Tommy French. As an artist I work in printmaking, performance, public engagement, curating and intervention; and I lead museum tours.

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Saturday 3 August 2019

Altering the landscape

Sixteen years ago I began working with the British Library, my first job being a commission from Sophie Weeks, to whom I here pay tribute as an imaginative and challenging education manager, to design a family activity guide to the Library exhibition on the Lindisfarne Gospels. The guide was fun, with thought-provoking questions built into relevant design motifs, using mazes, broad reachings out to designs from other cultures (looking for similarities between step-designs from Anglo-Saxon and contemporary Moche designs in Peru), and positing possible links between limpets and the red dots that appear as a leitmotif throughout the book. The project was my introduction to the Lindisfarne Gospels, produced in Wearmouth around 1,300 years ago, a work of outstanding beauty, and now one of the highlights of any visit to the British Library; being asked to produce something that would be fun, engaging and ask questions of its users required me to draw on knowledge from other sources as well as to research enough about the subject to make sensible comment and avoid errors of fact.

Now, at the sad end of the wide-ranging, free-thinking and hugely successful programme that Sophie helped set up, I have at last been able to visit the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. It is a charming place – the clement weather helped, the light inshore winds tempering bright sunshine – and has a lot to offer beyond reference to its links to the famous volume. There is the dramatic castle, dating from Tudor times and redesigned by Edward Lutyens (the guide’s history talk is excellent), a lovely little garden by Gertrude Jekyll which draws in hundreds of butterflies, a quiet village with cottage gardens, remarkably little tourist tat, a generous supply of public toilets, and a pile of monastic ruins. At low tide you can wade out to St Cuthbert’s Island, not much more than a lump of rock with a cross, or, depending on how you feel about religion, history, cultural roots, and so on, much, much more than a lump of rock with a cross. 

The beaches and harbour are a delight too. You can see the southern end of the island from the castle, including the eastern beach, enjoying the same view that monks would have had when in 793 CE Viking raiders first arrived. Now the beach is characterised, like so many other rocky beaches at sites of tourism, with columns of balancing stones. They stand more thickly than people on the beach, testaments to – to what? Territory-marking? The need to leave a monument? The enjoyment of a challenge overcome? Like the padlocks on the bridge in Paris, like graffiti everywhere, these are quickly becoming just one more manifestation of the statement, ‘I was here, just like you’. Should we be generous and suggest that in this place, these might be acts of devotion, related to the cairns built up by monks, hill-walkers and trigonometrists? Or are they bland echoes of what began as a nice idea, and now as ubiquitously clichéd as the behind-the-beat clapping at ice-skating competitions? Have they moved from statements of ‘I was here’ to statements of ‘marking my presence here is more important than the place itself’. 



Recent debate has proposed that the repeated act of rock-stacking should be considered destructive: the piles destroy habitats, they can be dangerous, they massively change the nature and culture of environments. Against this are the suggestions that they are a folk art, communal and non-commercial, even anti-commercial. An information centre at Lindisfarne asks visitors to ‘Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints’, fast becoming another cliché; should it add – ‘take your litter away with you, and don’t build those annoying stacks of rocks’? 

From my point of view the trouble is that they have become very boring. One column on a beach, built in an idle moment and then knocked down, is fine, an alternative to sand-castles where the beach is not sandy. One column left standing is perhaps ok; 148 of them constitutes an eyesore. If people built rock-stacks, photographed them, and then took them down, that would be fine; but we are far too fond of ourselves to do that. As a family of four we disputed whether it was ok to shy stones at them; despite the ‘don’t upset the neighbours’ mentality that acts like a sea-anchor on any reaction to what annoys us, there was not much dissent. Knocking down a column, from a meaningful distance, took a good few throws; but we took out a good few dozen. 

As children we used to dam and undam streams, we built castles of wet sand knowing the sea would come and fill the moat and then bring down walls and towers. We learned what ‘passing fun’ meant, we learned that it could mean repeated enjoyment. A beach of permanent sandcastles would be daft and dull, a place where you had to go and admire and not touch. Over a few hundred years the beach has become a place of fun, not reverence, a place where the sea washes away sandwich crumbs, bad jokes, ill-advised romances, childhood games. 

As we cheered our successful hits I listened for an accusatory shout of ‘Vikings!’; I heard nothing. But in that revered site of Christian antiquity I did have a stone in my hand.

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