The train that carried me from the airport sliced through a landscape that belied the headlines of the MSM or even the trending hot-potato topics on social media (whatever your preferred flavor). This was not the United Kingdom of censorship, grey bureaucracy, and urban decay. Here were green fields, old brick homes, and rustic rest left unrenovated regardless of the state of the buildings that could be seen out of the window. A different England, where whispers of hard, honest toil over cobblestones and candlelight still linger, just a breath of history away.
The town that embraced the station where I had to get off greeted me with charm and contradiction, a town breathing history yet suffocating under its future. Dilapidated walls and beautiful old townhouses rested uneasily on the carcass of fast-food chains, while the silent shadows of empty, once homely, storefronts told a tale of a culture unsure of where it is going, even as its stones remember where it has been.
And yet, hidden in that postcard paradox, gems remain, unpolished and raw. Street food stalls still serve tradition, probably just as unhealthy, but at least with a trace of local character, beyond the hollow parody that modern fish-and-chips has become.
A message lit my phone, Ben was in town and eager to go. Historical streets come with little to no parking space.
After tossing myself and my bags into his truck, greeted enthusiastically by Samson (Chief of security and good moods), we curved away from the town into something more elemental. Green grasslands and robust forests rolled past, a scenery that forces even the hurried to slow down, sometimes by nothing more dramatic than a tractor dragging hay bales through what counts here as rush hour.
At the end of a meandering road, we arrived at his citadel. There we found Chief Monkey waiting, someone I had only briefly met years ago, but well enough that both of us remembered. Together, we explored Ben’s compound, which gave the impression of a living organism in flux, bridges mid-construction, cabins mid-thought, a sauna rising like a promise across the river. Two lakes or huge ponds, each stocked with their own fish species, and occasionally a dog convinced that joy lives in every ball tossed, especially if it splashes into the water.
The three of us spoke the rest of the day, Plebian Market, Nostr, art, commerce, and the messy, sacred tension between money, meaning, and health.
More specifically about the paradox of the advanced state of modern medicine and their willful ignoring of alternative medication that could be beneficial to patients, be it complementary or as a stand-alone solution, were it not that the profits are found where solutions tend to be scarce, even if that scarcity is artificial.
In the later hours Chief and I even explored the potential path crossing of books and textile, but that is a rabbit hole that might have to be explored later.