Would the man himself have approved? An early contender for the monthly OM 'We Are Not Worthy' award.
The recently formed Wainwright Society - it was formed last year
to venerate the crusty old 'prose poet of the Lakes' - has succumbed
to a serious bout of navel gazing.
On its web
site, Eric Robson, chairman of The Wainwright Society and
presenter of BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time considers the
dread possibility that the man himeself might -shock horror - have
disapproved of the society bearing his name.
'The last thing Alfred Wainwright would have wanted is an
appreciation society with a website,' he muses, alive to the the
probability that AW wouldn't have had the least idea of what a web
site is.
Which seems like a reasonably supposition given that he famously
preferred to roam the fells alone shunning human company in favour of
rocks, sheep and plants, which is fair enough. The idea of being
worshipped in the same way as, say, the cast of Star Trek might not,
you could reasonably surmise, not be high on his list of priorities.
But just as the Society seems about to eat itself and disband,
Robson digs deep into the bag of rationalisation and pulls out a
gem:
'AW's stock in trade was communication. He communicated better
than any guide book writer before or since the essence of the
Lakeland landscape, the visceral attachment of man to place, the
spiritual power of weathered rock and angry sky. He was priest and
poet in his own blunt way.'
We are not worthy...
Then in a huge gesture of 'we are not worthiness' he pulls out a
cringeing justification for the site's further existence:
'All we can do is use the cruder, less creative, technologies at
our disposal and give our best shot at allowing the lines of
communication he opened to reach new generations of
fellwanderers.'
And so the Wainwright Society rolls on. If you'd like to know more
about it, take a look a the Wainwright
Society web site.
