The Four Seasons Chapter Two ~ Introduction with Podcast

Introduction to the 2nd Edition of the Audio Book of the same title

Introduction

IN 2009, although my home was in Liverpool, for sixteen months (June 2009 - October 2010) I was invited to practise law further up the coast, in the beautiful county of Lancashire.

I worked in Lytham St Annes, Kirkham and the newly chartered city of Preston, taking lodgings in the seaside town of Blackpool, about three hundred meters from Blackpool Tower, in Lord Street, returning home each weekend to Liverpool.

Settling into my new routine, approaching Autumn - or the Fall as many of you aptly name this beautiful season - I sensed a distinct chill in the air.

Often, in Britain in recent years, summer rolls on and plays around with autumn until quite late in the year. But this year was different. The wind had an edge even in the last weekend of August, our bank holiday.

In Liverpool, winter usually arrived around October time, when the long black shin-length great coat came out. Up there on the northwest coast, we need that! But to my amazement, in 2009 I was wearing it on 1st September.

We might be in for a harder winter
than the usual mild winters
to which
we have become accustomed,
methinks!

I was indeed right.

*

So I decided to write The Four Seasons ~ an ongoing piece of creative writing, just for me, following the seasons as I moved around the country. This time, I was writing in ‘real-time’, as opposed to ‘memory’. This is a quite different writing style and, as many will know, memory-recall underpins the two very popular and much earlier pieces An English Country Garden (2004) and Cleeve Hill (2006).

*

At forty-eight pages, The Four Seasons was also the longest piece, and when published by Spiderwize in hardback as Part VIII of Meanderings ~ An Anthology of Poetry and Prose in October 2011, it became the favourite of many, parts of which I am often asked to read.

The Seasons are observed through the eyes of four beautiful young women, sisters, and as many families know, sisters often do not get on well together. So we have a few upsets between the girls!

*

Around 2014, an indigenous American friend (Johnny) mentioned to me that there is for him a wider concept to the seasons if I consider his People’s culture. Nature might have four seasons, but those four seasons have four brothers, the four winds, and also the animal kingdom represented so beautifully, in Johnny’s culture, by the Great Bear, the Moose, the Panther and the Doe.

This instantly resonated with me.

I tend to side very much with the indigenous American nations. For this, the less tolerant - or shall we say, narrow-minded - have taken exception.

They do, however, begin to see the point when I remind them tactfully that here, in Britain, we were none-too-pleased when the Nordic and Scandinavian people came across the seas, followed by the Angles and the Saxons, and then the Romans, and finally the Normans. Fortunately, we saw off the Spanish Armada in 1588, ‘the little corporal’ (Napoleon Bonaparte) in 1805 and 1815, and more recently an ‘austrian corporal’ in 1940.

And thus my friend had opened up a whole new dimension to what we tend to simply think of as Autumn or Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer.

My exploration enabled me to do something else too.

I threw off the strait-jacket of boxed-up Christianity (and this can be said of any and all religions that readers are familiar with), to give me the freedom to think outside the box, considering also the thorny subject of Ecumenism, something of a problem for those tending towards a narrow-minded view.

Johnny’s input enabled me to not only write The Four Winds as the sequel but to bring the whole story to a beautiful ending with O Great Being of the Skies.

*

When the whole work was put together, it was a surprise to receive messages from parents on the work’s popularity as a bedtime story, not least because it also helped the little ones to agree that, yes, as one American mom put it, it was bedtime, and it was right to now put the light out and go to sleep “so you can be bright and fresh in the morning and for all the fun we’ll have!”

I do not write that flippantly.

A lifetime has made me very aware of the suffering of children, and I admit I try not to dwell upon the newsreels I glimpsed as a tiny boy and wondered just how the world could have turned into one writhing mass of global death and destruction. I recall one reel and thinking, ‘but they’re only children. Like me!’ I was frozen to the spot, at which point mum came in, saw what I was glued to and whisked me away. Nothing has changed. We are as bad today as we were then.

*

This, then, is the reason behind this edition, and what better way, having completed the very successful and popular short serial The Angel of Death Passed Over - to see out the old year and ring in the new year, 2021!

I do so also because I am an optimist.

The pandemic has caused us problems in every nation, in every community, and worldwide. I wrote that line on 1 January 2021. Little did I know that 13 months later on Tuesday 24 February 2022 Russia would invade Ukraine and light the fuse that still burns at an accelerating rate towards history’s confirmation that this date would mark the opening gambit of World War Three. As I write this on 9 December 2022, nothing dissuades me from this view, having seen the news last evening of a very pompous and arrogant Vladimir Putin at a Kremlin reception.

Our ability to rise to the challenge, to work together for the common good - albeit, often behind the scenes because to do so publicly would upset the delicate balance of national and international politics - is attested, and already we set our sights on a brighter 2024. We just have to smooth out 2023 first.

THIS is what life is all about.

The Four Seasons of England Series: ‘Winter’s Premature Arrival’: will publish on

Monday, 4 January 1 2021

and the Series will run every Monday thereafter

9 December 2022
All Rights Reserved

© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022-2023