THE MARKET SQUARE is flecked with trees. A lasso of thoroughfares, cut throughs and up-ways is strung around it, this the town's nexus. As a child I bought my fishing nets and colouring pencils here, also red notebooks to keep dice cricket scorecard. It's where I assembled with schoolmates to chew gum and look cool in a Harrington jacket or gaze wistfully at the stairs by the side of Burton's that led to the snooker hall above. I've settled in other towns at various times and I live here no longer, but this is where I call home.
A clock tower stands proudly in the centre. Any civic ambition is blunted by its architectural probity and homeliness. It is a totem. Around it Christmas carols are sung and the war dead memorialised. Carnival flotilla circled like warring Red Indians once; the Boys' Brigade, a Methodist mix of honour and acne, marched upon its apron.
In my childhood this was a grand setting. At its lower end was municipal pomp. A statue of John Hampden stood in front of the courthouse and pointed accusingly at Westminster; behind was the council chamber. A smattering of banks and an old coaching inn have outlived Hampden's tax revolt, but these banks contain few staff, certainly none that know your name, and the inn is now a Wetherspoon pub serving fries and burger. Bank tellers, suet pudding and the sweetmeats of old have disappeared like so much else. I gaze halfway up the square where, as if to prove this point, a cherished public house once stood. It has been replaced by a four-storey office block. The metal window frames are arrogant, the brickwork pale and pasty, mockeries of previous timber frame and rubble masonry. I recall the dishevelled streets that lay behind the cafe in which I sit: over three-hundred years old, joyfully slapstick yet bulldozed in the name of concrete. Today, the cherry blossom still falls and tufts of pigeon rise to take stock of the chimneys and stacked rooftops and it's been like that for as long as I can remember.
Footsteps crossing the Market Square to and fro, people in transit, never at rest. I can't hear this metronomic shuffle as I drink my coffee but I see its mime. Silent footsteps of exodus, from work to bus station, from supermarket to home.
In my mind's eye I picture the Israelites as they trudged the desert behind Moses, a meander that lasted forty years. From Pharaoh's whip to Mount Sinai, from slavery to the Promised Land. All they wanted was the peace and rest we ask for today. Food and water and a return to the regularity afforded them by life under Egyptian masters which, surrounded now by wilderness, they reimagined as comfort. Moses spoke to their Yahweh: manna fell from the sky and torrents of water were released from the rock at Horeb and for God's chosen people it remained like that for as long as they cared to remember.
The LORD said to Moses, "I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, 'At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God.'"
Sometime earlier, after Aaron's staff had swallowed those of Egypt's magicians, Pharaoh consulted his Babylonian reference books: the name Yahweh was not found. As Pharaoh's heart hardened, as he broke each promise made, this God of Israel remonstrated with him and his nation, its sorcerers and their magic, with plagues, darkness and the deaths of their firstborn.
The Israelites participated in these shenanigans. To stay safe, they had daubed each lintel and doorpost with sacrificial blood from a lamb. A while later, after the Red Sea parted and the chasing chariots sunk under deep water, Moses and the Israelites sang lengthy rounds of praise to the Most High: I will sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted.
This round is reprised throughout the Old Testament, embedded as securely in Israel's memory as, dare I say, my home town's Market Square is in mine. The Square's cherry blossom, likened to confetti, has been commemorated in Marillion's well-known popular song, too, just as Miriam, Aaron's sister, shook a tambourine to dance, to sing, to remember that Yahweh, her Most High, is to be highly exalted.
Not much later, when Moses climbed Mount Sinai, the tribes became restless: their gold earrings were smelted, a calf was cast and worshipped. Moses had been gone forty days and in that time Israel's faith was ransacked and the memory of praise given to their Yahweh was wiped.
It's no different today. Apparently there is little need to sing praise to the Most High, and it's been much longer than forty days since that rot set in. Atheism is factory setting for those who came of age after Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was published, when quarks, black holes and quantum mechanics became demotic currency. Centuries of heavyweight philosophy and tomfoolery, tilting globes, the absurd evolutionary slam dunk of Darwin, the droll Christopher Hitchens cabaret act, and a worldview that places the cult of the theoretical above the natural. No longer do we observe what is the case; rather, science tells us what the case is. Alongside this cleverness came a Protestant Reformation and the spirit of capitalism, appreciated as discernment and comfort. Magical belief was shunned by the learned wealthy and deemed appropriate only for impoverished losers or the credulous. We all became upwardly mobile, removed our dunce's caps and set aside the metaphysical. We reimagined the promised land.
Spontaneous creation rather than superstition is the new cool now, and the office workers and shoppers who stampede the Market Square today refuse to recognise that magic – the Babylonian disobedience that confronted Moses – continues in our world. Instead, one knee is bent and one arm lifted high in this very square while people chant BLACK lives MATTER, an incantation to dark power if ever there was. We listen to rock music rinsed through every occultist tic and we allow television, Hollywood runes and Disney's wizardry to cast spells. When a queen is buried, we stand in rank with an archbishop to watch the Lord Chamberlain break a wand and rest it upon her coffin; we fail to question what a wand represents. Our days are enchanted by the skeuomorphic hex of a heliocentric universe, nothing more than obeisance to a sun deity, and we raise solar energy panels high and hagiographic in its orbit; the church even promotes a day that honours Ra before the Sabbath. For our well-being we accept synthetic potion, John the Revelator's pharmakeia no less; it is riddled with aborted fetus, though we choose to regard this as science rather than human sacrifice.
I've never heard the word magic spoken from a pulpit; I've never seen a vicar do a card trick either but I don’t get around much anymore. I guess most vicars concentrate on the good stuff and forget the hocus pocus of their adolescent Black Sabbath LPs. Truly, we do not understand we live in Biblical times always, that we must be spiritually alert. We imagine only big hitters like Moses or Elijah have shootouts with magical disobedience, never us.
* * *
IN THIS SQUARE housewives struggled with heavy bags filled by the many traders who once spread their wares over its cobbles. Workers pushed their bikes or a policeman paced his beat. A human tableau. I remember the traffic funnelling round the square's narrow carriageway. It traced each corner like a medieval plough, the repetitive fume forming a ridge and furrow of choking atmosphere. I recall the old men of yesteryear moaning about the decline in this town's architecture even then, remarking on the increase in choke and ill-manners, scrutinizing the gait of the hobbling crowd, its sullen footstep compared to the generous stride of the previous generation. These old men fulminated against modern life and they sounded much the same as I do. Except today's brick really is more insipid, window frames more arrogant.
Once I imagined I was no more than a reoccurrence of a stereotype of misery, a relay of recreational pastiche. These old men passed the baton to me and I promised not to drop it. Such monotonous, muttered complaint and a suspicion of novelty are necessary, surely, to keep hold of the past but also to steer life's forward pattern. That pattern might be incremental and once it was called progress. Dragged with it were aspects of the past and our mutterings helped the process of change be an almost invisible process. I recall the multiplication tables and algorithmic fancy printed on the back covers of those red notebooks I bought from the market decades ago, steady measurements fit for a time when stability mattered. Dr Who may have metamorphosed, prime ministers came and went and cricketer Geoff Boycott was eventually to retire, but hectares, links and gallons remained the same: rhythmic anchors underneath the here and now.
I join the dots of this round of criticism sung by successive generations. At some point the baton was dropped, moaning moved on from hobby to full-time job. During which of Boycott's centuries it happened, which series of Dr Who, I have no idea. One night in my sleep all those hectares, links and gallons shifted their dimensions. The world I greet each morning has little in common with my childhood days. Society is brusque and cold, politics and media are crowded by oafs, not just warmongers refuse peace, a man can become a woman. Even worse, AI and the pharmaceutical golden calf control everything. These are the footsteps to Armageddon. We tread them always, of course, but it's a slow passage no longer.
* * *
SENTINEL BOLLARDS block the traffic this afternoon but people cross the square still, from work to bus station, from supermarket to home. An exodus of empty hearts shuffle by with no sighting of the magic that surrounds and woos them and no understanding where their footsteps tread. I want to shake everyone in this square. I want to tell them how my Yahweh is to be highly exalted, that He is the Most High. Yahusha/Jesus returns in judgement soon. I need to tell them that also.
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