Opus Diaboli

As a bookish 15 year-old, an oblique reference in an article about HR Giger led me to pick up a secondhand copy of HP Lovecraft’s The Lurking Fear.

I was instantly hooked… I loved Lovecraft’s stories of how a chance discovery of an ancient  book might open doorways to unimagined worlds, and his tales of Dunwich, and Innsmouth – ancient towns where things had gone badly wrong for the inhabitants.  Dunwich was the focus of the Dunwich Horror and played a smaller role in many of his other weird tales.

It was therefore with some trepidation that I pulled off the main road towards the sign saying ‘Dunwich – 4 miles’ and sped down a single track road so narrow, the trees either side touched branches overhead.

Dunwich, on the Suffolk coastline, was Lovecraft’s inspiration for his  fictional town, which he set in Massachusetts.

The Suffolk Dunwich had been a prosperous and important port town on the Suffolk coastline until 1286, when  a huge sea surge undermined the cliffs upon which it was built.  Most of the town was swept into the sea, taking (by some accounts) eight ancient churches with it. It has been said that during storms, the bells of the lost spires can still be heard ringing under the water.

Although Lovecraft’s poem The Bells specifically refers to Innsmouth, it was surely inspired by the myths of Dunwich…

Year after year I heard that faint, far ringing
Of deep-toned bells on the black midnight wind;
Bells of no steeple I could ever find.

The poem ends…

They tolled – but from the sunless tides that pour
Through sunken valleys on the sea’s dead floor.

The visitor can now walk along the bottom of the cliffs, looking up at the remaining village at the top, but sadly I didn’t hear the ‘Mad Clappers’ tolling.

One of the few remaining indications of the the town’s splendour before it was taken by the sea, are the ruins of the abbey.  Lovecraft, who described the 18th century buildings of New England as ‘impossibly old’  would have been impressed.

Driving 200 miles due west will take you to Birmingham, ancient city of the midlands. While there doesn’t at first sight seem to be much to attract the seeker of the unusual as you drive past seemingly endless council estates… a visit to the town centre will not disappoint.  One of the first exhibits to the greet the visitor the city’s central art gallery and museum is Epstein’s giant bronze of Lucifer…

This is a truly striking piece of work and I am going to have to find out more about it.

A five minute drive from the centre of town (or 15 minutes by foot) is the disappointing jewellery quarter.  Marketed by the city as an area for artisan jewellers, it is in fact a district full of wholesale sellers of bargain-basement jewellery that you can find anywhere.

However, the district has two Victorian gothic cemeteries. These, like Portsmouth’s once-fabulous Kingston Cemetery had been desecrated by the local authority, resentful of the cost of upkeep and greedy for more places to sell for burial plots.
Gravestones had either been uprooted or flattened. Mercifully sanity has prevailed, with local groups forming to preserve and restore the cemeteries to something approximating their former glory.

An oasis of peace and quiet in the bustle of Birmingham. Definitely worth a detour on a sunny Spring day.

Walpurgisnacht this year finds us in a tense, yet heartwarming place… with the world’s economies still in meltdown and on the cusp of the most hotly contested general election in decades, we are witnessing the collapse of the pestilent Labour government. First The Sun, then The Times and even the last true socialist newspaper of quality, The Guardian has abandoned support for Labour.
And who can blame them? Labour swept to power in 1997 on a promise of ‘education, education, education’ and ‘no more boom and bust’. Thirteen years later, one in five children leaves school functionally illiterate and the national debt is the equivalent of £31,000 for each person in employment.
This week, the thuggish Brown, in a break from the scripted, Stalinist encounters he usually has with hand-picked ‘voters’ – actually met one of the real people who support him. She asked him a pertinent question about the effect of immigration on jobs in her region. Afterwards, as he thrashed around looking for someone to blame for his own inability to answer questions (“whose idea was that?”), he slandered his own supporter as “bigoted”.
Hopefully what we will soon see is Labour shifted to third place in the polls, as they were in recent local government elections – and then bloodletting with begin. Accusation and counter accusation with flow thick and fast, and Labour will destroy itself… blaming, as usual, everyone else.
But hold! Is the death of socialism in the UK only part of a wider story? Since… well since living memory, really, Greece has been running itself on an economic model devised by the kind of students who draw hammers and sickles on their jeans in ballpen.
Their country, now bankrupt, has had to go cap-in-hand to the rest of Europe for a bailout.
A hopeless debtor, who sees his entire monthly paycheque disappear in interest payments and credit card penalties, eventually sits down and works out a strategy that will pay off the debt. This usually involves a period of living on cornflakes and water. The entire country of Greece is now in this position. The Greek people, as they have since Plato first drew a hammer and sickle on his toga, took to the streets to protest. Like a truculent teenager confronted with the fact that their behaviour has maxed out the family credit card – their response has been ‘well get another one then!’. Even the Greek government which has perpetrated the idea of state-provided free money and jobs, has reluctantly said this cannot go on.

When, in 2008 the world’s economy finally did go to Hell in a handcart, certain university lecturers who, despite the lessons of history and their own comfortable middle-class lifestyles, still claimed to be Marxists, were writing pieces for the broadsheet newspapers proclaiming the ‘death of Capitalism’. This has not happened, the cost has been great, but the mechanisms of Capitalism stayed in place and it has largely, repaired itself. In every case where a Communist country has undergone similar financial upheaval, it has ended up with thousands of people starving to death – Ayn Rand’s first-hand account of life in Russia in ‘We the Living’ being a good example.

Capitalism works and Communism never does. It was for this reason that in the late part of the 20th century we saw the death of Communism, with first Russia and then China giving up the pretence of anything even remotely Marxist in the way they conduct their economies. Communism is no longer the indulgence of superpowers, or even the second rate countries – only basket cases such as North Korea and Cuba cling to this model by force of will and by believing their own tractor production figures.
Perhaps now, two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, socialism – Communism’s sallow-faced sibling – will also finally expire.
Then perhaps we will have heard the last of the idea that you can only strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.