Furness Morris Dancers' future under threat after 62 years
Mr Ord said: "We've lost a few members over the recent years. "They've either moved away, or sadly one died, and we've had a few injuries."We've gone down to very low numbers and you need a minimum number to be able to put on a decent show. We're struggling."Mr Ord, who has been with the group for 50 years, said at least half a dozen new members were needed to help its survival.There are currently eight, but there were 20 in its prime.Mr Ord urged people to come and try out Morris dancing with friends."It's just a great social activity. It keeps you fit, you mix with people. "The music is wonderful and it gets you around the villages and towns in South Cumbria and the Lake District."
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The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Helm by Sarah Hall review – a mighty epic of climate change in slow motion
Even if Sarah Hall did not begin her acknowledgments by saying that it's taken her 20 years to write Helm it would be evident. Not from a cursory glance at her bibliography, perhaps: in that time Hall has published six other novels and three volumes of extraordinary short stories. But in every other way, and the moment you begin reading. There's the subject, for starters. Ever since the first paragraph of her first novel, Haweswater, in which an early 20th-century man drives his horse and cart through the waters of a Cumbrian valley recently drowned by a dam, Hall has been concerned with landscape, with weather, with nature in all its forms, with the ways in which we affect each other. In The Carhullan Army, climate change has already happened. Cumbria is semi-tropical, temperate England a folk memory; a dystopian vision that feels, this baked summer, uncomfortably close to reality. The Wolf Border, published in 2015, was, among many other things, about the ethics and unpredictabilities of rewilding an apex predator, while Hall's last novel, Burntcoat, written in the first lockdown, was set in and after a pandemic. Her story Later, His Ghost is set in a perpetual windstorm of total climate breakdown; in One in Four, a virologist writes to his wife, apologising for getting things wrong. In this new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain's only named wind. This wind, which is local to Cumbria, occurs when air sweeping down Cross Fell, above the Eden valley, creates both a crest and a low bar of cloud. 'Tricky to explain/visualise', admits Helm. 'For now, imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again and again.' As the book begins, Helm witnesses its own arrival. An ice age, sun flares, ash cloud; and, relatively insignificant in the context of such deep time, the evolution of humanity. Because there are many people in the novel, too, which is structured by braiding their stories with Helm's, but also with lists: the forces of Helm, for instance, which range from '0. Zero Helm (complete calm). Mean wind speed < 1mph. Weathervanes and trees unmoving, grass still, water as mirror, smoke rising vertically from roundhouses/cottages/plague pyres' to '12. Hurricane Helm (Hand of God). Wind speed 73-83mph, phenomenal damage and widescale loss of life, Eden reconfigured biblically, Carlisle-Settle train lifted off the tracks, history made, FIN.' Other lists include names for Helm and the damage Helm can wreak; or the trinkets Helm collects, often after that damage (Howdah pistol, iron skullcap, Apple iPhone 11 64GB, Tornado F3 series, eject pin). The pictures humans make, trying to understand, locate, corral Helm. Helm finds people amusing, and watches as they succeed each other; Hall's ambition may be bounded by one valley, but it reaches through thousands of years. Her subjects range from a neolithic tribe to a medieval exorcist; from an isolated 18th-century wife to a quixotic Victorian meteorologist; from a wind-touched, lonely mid-20th-century child to a present-day academic counting plastic particles in the air. From stone tools to the Industrial Revolution to the advent of AI, each era has its own existential encounters with Helm: as deity or devil, as a psychological or a scientific mystery. Both sides are made complacent by Helm's longevity, size and power, by human smallness and briefness, neither realising, until perhaps too late, that these little beings threaten Helm's own existence. A project of this scope, which requires a range of research and imagination that could have produced several historical novels, not to mention an entire other volume of meteorological expertise, holds so much in suspension around its whirling, windy core that it could easily blow apart. But, despite the occasional threat or lull, Helm doesn't. Partly, I would argue, this is because of Hall's development as a consummate short story writer. Her novels are never less than hugely accomplished, but the narrative demands of the longer form, especially in more conventional earlier work, can sometimes dissipate the blaze of which she is capable. Hall is freed by the constraints of the short story – like the female sculptor in her last novel, Burntcoat, she burns away everything extraneous – and her work only gains in concentrated, suggestive power. Each strand of Helm has this concentration; the characters and voices could stand alone, but they flow together into something deep and rich, held together by the Eden valley, and its Helm. And by the writing. Hall's work on place, and especially this corner of England, has always been virtuosic, a tough and supple poetry anchored in decades of attention to Cumbrian land and plants and skies. In her first novels it sometimes threatened to submerge everything else, but in Helm is so embedded on the page that it's easy to take for granted, until you pause and back up to really look at the 'dirty, clay-slipped sky', or a gaggle of Victorian children, born into the shantytown that grows up around the railway, collecting on a hillside to eat magic mushrooms and stare at the 'silly jinking stars'. Every era in Helm has its own seeing; the same land, the same wind filtered through time-specific fears and hopes and work, time-specific knowings, from a neolithic world interpreted through animal behaviour to the bathos of 21st-century cycling waterproofs, pub menus, emails. Hall has a thrilling command of vocabulary, with the concurrent deployment of etymologies and the hinterlands they bring; words often work not as single notes, but as chords, big ideas slipping in on the wakes of concrete specificities. So NaNay, a neolithic girl, watches as the wind approaches: 'In the centre it was blue-grey, like bull-hide, with the dull pearl-shine of scales at its edges. It was faceless and its body was its only government.' The 'spectral gap' is a technical term of modern mathematics and quantum mechanics as well as meteorology. But what heft and metaphorical possibility such a gap has, when a retired policeman in a glider is required to fly into it. Above all it is the wind itself that holds this vastly ambitious, serious – but also often playful and ironic – book together. Some might find Helm's voice initially a little arch, a little unplaced relative to the human voices, but it grows on you. Antic, needy, angry, curious, millennia-old Helm, who gives and takes, fascinates and awes, is feared and loved, and loves in return; who absorbs violences, propitiations, yearnings, and who is now beginning to feel 'a bit wrong'. There has been so much change, over so many millennia, but this is different. 'It's complicated. Hard to put Helm's fingers on it.' It isn't that Helm is old, more that 'Whatever is wrong … feels insidious, sneaky, infectious. The surprise disease on the routine tests. Some kind of weird intimate growth you find accidentally and go, Jesus, how long has that been there? A toxic waft when you're asleep. Lights out.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The neolithic tribe listens to Helm in its prime, 'splintering and shredding the valley, its voice mourning its own violence'. In the mid-20th century Helm searches for a young girl, his friend, who has been locked in an asylum, and, trying to look beyond the valley, 'rises, higher, until being is difficult'. At the 21st-century meteorological observation post, 2,000ft up, Helm whips and churns and 'calls to awful prayer'. A prayer for itself, perhaps, because whatever Hall's intentions – an urgent rallying, a tribute, a warning – this novel reads like nothing so much as an elegy. Helm by Sarah Hall is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Helm by Sarah Hall review – a mighty epic of climate change in slow motion
Even if Sarah Hall did not begin her acknowledgments by saying that it's taken her 20 years to write Helm it would be evident. Not from a cursory glance at her bibliography, perhaps: in that time Hall has published six other novels and three volumes of extraordinary short stories. But in every other way, and the moment you begin reading. There's the subject, for starters. Ever since the first paragraph of her first novel, Haweswater, in which an early 20th-century man drives his horse and cart through the waters of a Cumbrian valley recently drowned by a dam, Hall has been concerned with landscape, with weather, with nature in all its forms, with the ways in which we affect each other. In The Carhullan Army, climate change has already happened. Cumbria is semi-tropical, temperate England a folk memory; a dystopian vision that feels, this baked summer, uncomfortably close to reality. The Wolf Border, published in 2015, was, among many other things, about the ethics and unpredictabilities of rewilding an apex predator, while Hall's last novel, Burntcoat, written in the first lockdown, was set in and after a pandemic. Her story Later, His Ghost is set in a perpetual windstorm of total climate breakdown; in One in Four, a virologist writes to his wife, apologising for getting things wrong. In this new novel, weather and climate are not just potent settings but the main event. The central character in Helm is the Helm, Britain's only named wind. This wind, which is local to Cumbria, occurs when air sweeping down Cross Fell, above the Eden valley, creates both a crest and a low bar of cloud. 'Tricky to explain/visualise', admits Helm. 'For now, imagine a skater launching off a quarter pipe two thousand feet high, then somersaulting. Again. And again and again.' As the book begins, Helm witnesses its own arrival. An ice age, sun flares, ash cloud; and, relatively insignificant in the context of such deep time, the evolution of humanity. Because there are many people in the novel, too, which is structured by braiding their stories with Helm's, but also with lists: the forces of Helm, for instance, which range from '0. Zero Helm (complete calm). Mean wind speed < 1mph. Weathervanes and trees unmoving, grass still, water as mirror, smoke rising vertically from roundhouses/cottages/plague pyres' to '12. Hurricane Helm (Hand of God). Wind speed 73-83mph, phenomenal damage and widescale loss of life, Eden reconfigured biblically, Carlisle-Settle train lifted off the tracks, history made, FIN.' Other lists include names for Helm and the damage Helm can wreak; or the trinkets Helm collects, often after that damage (Howdah pistol, iron skullcap, Apple iPhone 11 64GB, Tornado F3 series, eject pin). The pictures humans make, trying to understand, locate, corral Helm. Helm finds people amusing, and watches as they succeed each other; Hall's ambition may be bounded by one valley, but it reaches through thousands of years. Her subjects range from a neolithic tribe to a medieval exorcist; from an isolated 18th-century wife to a quixotic Victorian meteorologist; from a wind-touched, lonely mid-20th-century child to a present-day academic counting plastic particles in the air. From stone tools to the Industrial Revolution to the advent of AI, each era has its own existential encounters with Helm: as deity or devil, as a psychological or a scientific mystery. Both sides are made complacent by Helm's longevity, size and power, by human smallness and briefness, neither realising, until perhaps too late, that these little beings threaten Helm's own existence. A project of this scope, which requires a range of research and imagination that could have produced several historical novels, not to mention an entire other volume of meteorological expertise, holds so much in suspension around its whirling, windy core that it could easily blow apart. But, despite the occasional threat or lull, Helm doesn't. Partly, I would argue, this is because of Hall's development as a consummate short story writer. Her novels are never less than hugely accomplished, but the narrative demands of the longer form, especially in more conventional earlier work, can sometimes dissipate the blaze of which she is capable. Hall is freed by the constraints of the short story – like the female sculptor in her last novel, Burntcoat, she burns away everything extraneous – and her work only gains in concentrated, suggestive power. Each strand of Helm has this concentration; the characters and voices could stand alone, but they flow together into something deep and rich, held together by the Eden valley, and its Helm. And by the writing. Hall's work on place, and especially this corner of England, has always been virtuosic, a tough and supple poetry anchored in decades of attention to Cumbrian land and plants and skies. In her first novels it sometimes threatened to submerge everything else, but in Helm is so embedded on the page that it's easy to take for granted, until you pause and back up to really look at the 'dirty, clay-slipped sky', or a gaggle of Victorian children, born into the shantytown that grows up around the railway, collecting on a hillside to eat magic mushrooms and stare at the 'silly jinking stars'. Every era in Helm has its own seeing; the same land, the same wind filtered through time-specific fears and hopes and work, time-specific knowings, from a neolithic world interpreted through animal behaviour to the bathos of 21st-century cycling waterproofs, pub menus, emails. Hall has a thrilling command of vocabulary, with the concurrent deployment of etymologies and the hinterlands they bring; words often work not as single notes, but as chords, big ideas slipping in on the wakes of concrete specificities. So NaNay, a neolithic girl, watches as the wind approaches: 'In the centre it was blue-grey, like bull-hide, with the dull pearl-shine of scales at its edges. It was faceless and its body was its only government.' The 'spectral gap' is a technical term of modern mathematics and quantum mechanics as well as meteorology. But what heft and metaphorical possibility such a gap has, when a retired policeman in a glider is required to fly into it. Above all it is the wind itself that holds this vastly ambitious, serious – but also often playful and ironic – book together. Some might find Helm's voice initially a little arch, a little unplaced relative to the human voices, but it grows on you. Antic, needy, angry, curious, millennia-old Helm, who gives and takes, fascinates and awes, is feared and loved, and loves in return; who absorbs violences, propitiations, yearnings, and who is now beginning to feel 'a bit wrong'. There has been so much change, over so many millennia, but this is different. 'It's complicated. Hard to put Helm's fingers on it.' It isn't that Helm is old, more that 'Whatever is wrong … feels insidious, sneaky, infectious. The surprise disease on the routine tests. Some kind of weird intimate growth you find accidentally and go, Jesus, how long has that been there? A toxic waft when you're asleep. Lights out.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The neolithic tribe listens to Helm in its prime, 'splintering and shredding the valley, its voice mourning its own violence'. In the mid-20th century Helm searches for a young girl, his friend, who has been locked in an asylum, and, trying to look beyond the valley, 'rises, higher, until being is difficult'. At the 21st-century meteorological observation post, 2,000ft up, Helm whips and churns and 'calls to awful prayer'. A prayer for itself, perhaps, because whatever Hall's intentions – an urgent rallying, a tribute, a warning – this novel reads like nothing so much as an elegy. Helm by Sarah Hall is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Daily Mail
Vanessa Feltz's ex Ben Ofoedu 'takes yet another swipe at the TV star' while on his honeymoon with new wife 'Vanessa 2.0'
Ben Ofoedu appeared to take another swipe at his ex Vanessa Feltz as he enjoyed his honeymoon this week after marrying his new bride, who he shamelessly calls 'Vanessa 2.0'. The Phats & Small singer, 52, was previously set to marry the TV personality, 63, until reports of his infidelity were leaked to the press in 2023. He has since moved on with aesthetics expert Vanessa Brown, who is 23 years his junior, marrying in a lavish £100,000 ceremony in Cumbria. However, despite his romance with Celebrity Big Brother star Vanessa ending two years ago, Ben has previously made a savage dig at his ex, claiming he'd 'wasted 17 years' in their relationship. And now on his honeymoon he appears to have taken another dig at Vanessa as he celebrated his new wife's 30th birthday this weekend in Lake Garda. As they enjoyed a drink out Ben filmed her before turning the camera back to himself to show he was wearing a black cap with '2.0' on it. After brazenly calling his new wife 'Vanessa 2.0' previously the hat could be another dig at his former partner. Ben captioned the post: 'Jay-Z's quote is, 'Men lie, women lie, but numbers don't.' It comes after in an exclusive Mail+ interview, Ben reflected on his relationship with the former This Morning agony aunt Feltz, stating: 'Never again will I do that. I wasted 17 years of my life. 'I don't believe in long engagements any more. You don't want to get married if there's a question mark over your engagement. 'If you don't want to commit to someone, that's fine. But don't pretend you do and hold on to someone for a long period of time. Let them free, let them fly.' Speaking of his joy at finally becoming a husband, Ben shared: 'I have been waiting for this feeling, I have always wanted to be married since I was seven years old. I always wanted to be with someone who would take my surname. 'I almost gave up on marriage, thinking there wasn't a lady that would walk down the aisle for me. 'I can't believe the day has come, it is a dream come true. It feels like I've been waiting for this moment all my life. This is the finale of the chapter that was 17 years of my life.' After undergoing therapy in the wake of their split, the DJ – who refuses to mention Feltz by name 'ever again' – said the torrid experience gave him clarity. Ben captioned the post: 'Jay-Z's quote is, ''Men lie, women lie, but numbers don't''' along with red heart emojis 'I knew what I was getting into going out with someone that talks about their sex life on TV. What did I expect? It was great media attention for her. I went into it with my eyes wide open thinking it wouldn't affect me, but it did.' As he surveyed the crowd of loved ones, Ofoedu reflected that the most valuable outcome of his break-up with Feltz was 'finding out who my real friends are'. He said: 'I thought I was friends with everyone but people acted differently towards me [after the break up]. At the time it hurt me but it turned out to be great because it showed me who actually had my back – every member of Boyzone and a couple of boys from Blu who couldn't be here. 'But I know she [Vanessa Feltz] will look at these pictures today and see that everyone here knows the truth about our relationship and the narrative she spun. 'This love with Vanessa [Brown] has made me realise that the other one didn't love me as much as she made out, we had two different definitions of love.' Insisting he didn't want to make his special day about the 'past', Ofoedu added: 'All of that was worth it and everything happens for a reason because I've found my perfect person. 'The main thing now [is] it's ended happily ever after for me – getting married in a beautiful castle in Carlisle and I'm happy. 'Vanessa is the woman of my dreams, our connection was instant and when I found out she was dreaming of a beautiful white wedding fit for a princess, I thought, 'Ben, it's time to get your Prince Charming boots on and be the fairytale prince she's always dreamed of'. 'As I look back at our beautiful romance it has confirmed my belief that true love is waiting around the corner – you just have to keep the faith.' Bride Vanessa echoed the sentiment, beaming as she recalled how their connection had been 'instant', adding: 'It was like everything suddenly made sense. When you know, you know.' She revealed the couple hope to start a family within the next year and are planning a business venture together. Though the new bride didn't shy away from referencing her husband's former relationship, she dismissed the negativity surrounding it. She said: 'When it comes to his last relationship, a lot of it is spiteful and untrue. 'I'm the right person for him. Their relationship ended for reasons the public weren't aware of. Everyone always says they have never seen Ben as happy as he is now. 'That's a testament to where he is in his life. He's completely fulfilled when previously he wasn't. 'To be honest I don't care whatsoever, I couldn't care less about her. She is his ex – I have exes – and they're in the past. 'Why would you care?' Brown adds, talking about Feltz. 'Enjoy your retirement, your family and just chill. Stop talking about it, it's so tragic! 'Part of me feels sorry for her but it's my life and I don't care.'
