Wind & Light

To Dunmail Park Workington to see Brian de Palma's Black Dahlia, which I'll be discussing on Radio Cumbria at 11.30 on Wednesday morning. The drive along the coast between my home town & Siddick is one shot through with powerful childhood memories: both my parents' families were from Grasslot, my grandparents ran The Station Inn there; the road takes you past the remains of the Miners' Arms at Flimby where my aunt was working behind the bar on the afternoon in 1966 when the last-ever shift came out of Risehow Pit and poured across the road for the wake; the Dunmail cinema sits opposite the landscaped relics of Siddick Pit where my uncle was shaftman for fifteen years. In my childhood the pit slagheap caught fire and the drive to Workington seemed guided by a column of smoke by day, by night an incandescent scar hovering in the middle air. Heaven knows to what promised land Cumbrians thought this planned economy was leading them, but yesterday evening the sky above Flimby was ablaze with sunlight on the undersides of the clouds and the great turbines of the Siddick windfarm were lined up and turning in stately cartwheels across the sky. The sheer aesthetic brilliance of this alignment, in distinction to the bright lights and belching chimneys of the Iggesund plant across the road, struck me as being by no means the least argument in favour of Cumbrian wind power.