Journal articles on the topic 'Muskrat – Virginia – Elizabeth River'

ABSTRACT The diversity of indigenous bacteria in sediments from several sites in the Elizabeth River (Virginia) able to degrade multiple polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) was investigated by the use of classical selective enrichment and molecular analyses. Enrichment cultures containing naphthalene, phenanthrene, fluoranthene, or pyrene as a sole carbon and energy source were monitored by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) to detect changes in the bacterial-community profile during enrichment and to determine whether the representative strains present were successfully cultured. The DGGE profiles of the final enrichments grown solely on naphthalene and pyrene showed no clear relationship with the site from which the inoculum was obtained. The enrichments grown solely on pyrene for two sample sites had >80% similarity, which suggests that common pyrene-degrading strains may be present in these sediments. The final enrichments grown on fluoranthene and phenanthrene remained diverse by site, suggesting that these strains may be influenced by environmental conditions. One hundred and one isolates were obtained, comprising representatives of the actinomycetes and alpha-, beta-, and gammaproteobacteria, including seven novel isolates with 16S rRNA gene sequences less than 98% similar to known strains. The ability to degrade multiple PAHs was demonstrated by mineralization of 14C-labeled substrate and growth in pure culture. This supports our hypothesis that a high diversity of bacterial strains with the ability to degrade multiple PAHs can be confirmed by the combined use of classical selective enrichment and molecular analyses. This large collection of diverse PAH-degrading strains provides a valuable resource for studies on mechanisms of PAH degradation and bioremediation.

"verbiage very thinly sliced and plated up real nice" (Barrett 1)IntroductionMany of us share in an obsessive collecting of cookbooks and recipes. Torn or cut from newspapers and magazines, recipes sit swelling scrapbooks with bloated, unfilled desire. They’re non-hybrid seeds, peas under the mattress, an endless cycle of reproduction. Desire and narrative are folded into each other in our drive, as humans, to create meaning. But what holds us to narrative is good writing. And what can also drive desire is image—literal as well as metaphorical—the visceral pleasure of the gaze, or looking and viewing the sensually aesthetic and the work of the imagination. Creative WritingCooking, winemaking, and food and wine writing can all be considered art. For example, James Halliday (31), the eminent Australian wine critic, posed the question “Is winemaking an art?,” answering: “Most would say so” (31). Cookbooks are stories within stories, narratives that are both factual and imagined, everyday and fantastic—created by both writer and reader from where, along with its historical, cultural and publishing context, a text gets its meaning. Creative writing, in broad terms of genre, is either fiction (imagined, made-up) or creative nonfiction (true, factual). Genre comes from the human taxonomic impulse to create order from chaos through cataloguing and classification. In what might seem overwhelming infinite variety, we establish categories and within them formulas and conventions. But genres are not necessarily stable or clear-cut, and variation in a genre can contribute to its de/trans/formation (Curti 33). Creative nonfiction includes life writing (auto/biography) and food writing among other subgenres (although these subgenres can also be part of fiction). Cookbooks sit within the creative nonfiction genre. More clearly, dietary or nutrition manuals are nonfiction, technical rather than creative. Recipe writing specifically is perhaps less an art and more a technical exercise; generally it’s nonfiction, or between that and creative nonfiction. (One guide to writing recipes is Ostmann and Baker.) Creative writing is built upon approximately five, more or less, fundamentals of practice: point of view or focalisation or who narrates, structure (plot or story, and theme), characterisation, heightened or descriptive language, setting, and dialogue (not in any order of importance). (There are many handbooks on creative writing, that will take a writer through these fundamentals.) Style or voice derives from what a writer writes about (their recurring themes), and how they write about it (their vocabulary choice, particular use of imagery, rhythm, syntax etc.). Traditionally, as a reader, and writer, you are either a plot person or character person, but you can also be interested primarily in ideas or language, and in the popular or literary.Cookbooks as Creative NonfictionCookbooks often have a sense of their author’s persona or subjectivity as a character—that is, their proclivities, lives and thus ideology, and historical, social and cultural place and time. Memoir, a slice of the author–chef/cook’s autobiography, is often explicitly part of the cookbook, or implicit in the nature of the recipes, and the para-textual material which includes the book’s presentation and publishing context, and the writer’s biographical note and acknowledgements. And in relation to the latter, here's Australian wine educator Colin Corney telling us, in his biographical note, about his nascent passion for wine: “I returned home […] stony broke. So the next day I took a job as a bottleshop assistant at Moore Park Cellars […] to tide me over—I stayed three years!” (xi). In this context, character and place, in the broadest sense, are inevitably evoked. So in conjunction with this para-textual material, recipe ingredients and instructions, visual images and the book’s production values combine to become the components for authoring a fictive narrative of self, space and time—fictive, because writing inevitably, in a broad or conceptual sense, fictionalises everything, since it can only re-present through language and only from a particular point of view.The CookbooksTo talk about the art of cookbooks, I make a judgmental (from a creative-writer's point of view) case study of four cookbooks: Lyndey Milan and Colin Corney’s Balance: Matching Food and Wine, Sean Moran’s Let It Simmer (this is the first edition; the second is titled Let It Simmer: From Bush to Beach and Onto Your Plate), Kate Lamont’s Wine and Food, and Greg Duncan Powell’s Rump and a Rough Red (this is the second edition; the first was The Pig, the Olive & the Squid: Food & Wine from Humble Beginnings) I discuss reading, writing, imaging, and designing, which, together, form the nexus for interpreting these cookbooks in particular. The choice of these books was only relatively random, influenced by my desire to see how Australia, a major wine-producing country, was faring with discussion of wine and food choices; by the presence of discursive text beyond technical presentation of recipes, and of photographs and purposefully artful design; and by familiarity with names, restaurants and/or publishers. Reading Moran's cookbook is a model of good writing in its use of selective and specific detail directed towards a particular theme. The theme is further created or reinforced in the mix of narrative, language use, images and design. His writing has authenticity: a sense of an original, distinct voice.Moran’s aphoristic title could imply many things, but, in reading the cookbook, you realise it resonates with a mindfulness that ripples throughout his writing. The aphorism, with its laidback casualness (legendary Australian), is affectively in sync with the chef’s approach. Jacques Derrida said of the aphorism that it produces “an echo of really curious, indelible power” (67).Moran’s aim for his recipes is that they be about “honest, home-style cooking” and bringing “out a little bit of the professional chef in the home cook”, and they are “guidelines” available for “sparkle” and seduction from interpretation (4). The book lives out this persona and personal proclivities. Moran’s storytellings are specifically and solely highlighted in the Contents section which structures the book via broad categories (for example, "Grains" featuring "The dance of the paella" and "Heaven" featuring "A trifle coming on" for example). In comparison, Powell uses "The Lemon", for example, as well as "The Sheep". The first level of Contents in Lamont’s book is done by broad wine styles: sparkling, light white, robust white and so on, and the second level is the recipe list in each of these sections. Lamont’s "For me, matching food and wine comes down to flavour" (xiii) is not as dramatic or expressive as Powell’s "Wine: the forgotten condiment." Although food is first in Milan and Corney’s book’s subtitle, their first content is wine, then matching food with colour and specific grape, from Sauvignon Blanc to Barbera and more. Powell claims that the third of his rules (the idea of rules is playful but not comedic) for choosing the best wine per se is to combine region with grape variety. He covers a more detailed and diversified range of grape varieties than Lamont, systematically discussing them first-up. Where Lamont names wine styles, Powell points out where wine styles are best represented in Australian states and regions in a longish list (titled “13 of the best Australian grape and region combos”). Lamont only occasionally does this. Powell discusses the minor alternative white, Arneis, and major alternative reds such as Barbera and Nebbiolo (Allen 81, 85). This engaging detail engenders a committed reader. Pinot Gris, Viognier, Sangiovese, and Tempranillo are as alternative as Lamont gets. In contrast to Moran's laidbackness, Lamont emphasises professionalism: "My greatest pleasure as a chef is knowing that guests have enjoyed the entire food and wine experience […] That means I have done my job" (xiii). Her reminders of the obvious are, nevertheless, noteworthy: "Thankfully we have moved on from white wine/white meat and red wine/red meat" (xiv). She then addresses the alterations in flavour caused by "method of cooking" and "combination of ingredients", with examples. One such is poached chicken and mango crying "out for a vibrant, zesty Riesling" (xiii): but where from, I ask? Roast chicken with herbs and garlic would favour "red wine with silky tannin" and "chocolatey flavours" (xiii): again, I ask, where from? Powell claims "a different evolution" for his book "to the average cookbook" (7). In recipes that have "a wine focus", there are no "pretty […] little salads, or lavish […] cakes" but "brown" albeit tasty food that will not require ingredients from "poncy inner-city providores", be easy to cook, and go with a cheap, budget-based wine (7). While this identity-setting is empathetic for a Powell clone, and I am envious of his skill with verbiage, he doesn’t deliver dreaming or desire. Milan and Corney do their best job in an eye-catching, informative exemplar list of food and wine matches: "Red duck curry and Barossa Valley Shiraz" for example (7), and in wine "At-a-glance" tables, telling us, for example, that the best Australian regions for Chardonnay are Margaret River and the Adelaide Hills (53). WritingThe "Introduction" to Moran’s cookbook is a slice of memoir, a portrait of a chef as a young man: the coming into being of passion, skill, and professionalism. And the introduction to the introduction is most memorable, being a loving description of his frugal Australian childhood dinners: creations of his mother’s use of manufactured, canned, and bottled substitutes-for-the-real, including Gravox and Dessert Whip (1). From his travel-based international culinary education in handmade, agrarian food, he describes "a head of buffalo mozzarella stuffed with ricotta and studded with white truffles" as "sheer beauty", "ambrosial flavour" and "edible white 'terrazzo'." The consonants b, s, t, d, and r are picked up and repeated, as are the vowels e, a, and o. Notice, too, the comparison of classic Italian food to an equally classic Italian artefact. Later, in an interactive text, questions are posed: "Who could now imagine life without this peppery salad green?" (23). Moran uses the expected action verbs of peel, mince, toss, etc.: "A bucket of tiny clams needs a good tumble under the running tap" (92). But he also uses the unexpected hug, nab, snuggle, waltz, "wave of garlic" and "raining rice." Milan and Corney display a metaphoric-language play too: the bubbles of a sparkling wine matching red meat become "the little red broom […] sweep[ing] away the […] cloying richness" (114). In contrast, Lamont’s cookbook can seem flat, lacking distinctiveness. But with a title like Wine and Food, perhaps you are not expecting much more than information, plain directness. Moran delivers recipes as reproducible with ease and care. An image of a restaurant blackboard menu with the word "chook" forestalls intimidation. Good quality, basic ingredients and knowledge of their source and season carry weight. The message is that food and drink are due respect, and that cooking is neither a stressful, grandiose nor competitive activity. While both Moran and Lamont have recipes for Duck Liver Pâté—with the exception that Lamont’s is (disturbingly, for this cook) "Parfait", Moran also has Lentil Patties, a granola, and a number of breads. Lamont has Brioche (but, granted, without the yeast, seeming much easier to make). Powell’s Plateless Pork is "mud pies for grown-ups", and you are asked to cook a "vat" of sauce. This communal meal is "a great way to spread communicable diseases", but "fun." But his passionately delivered historical information mixed with the laconic attitude of a larrikin (legendary Australian again) transform him into a sage, a step up from the monastery (Powell is photographed in dress-up friar’s habit). Again, the obvious is noteworthy in Milan and Corney’s statement that Rosé "possesses qualities of both red and white wines" (116). "On a hot summery afternoon, sitting in the sun overlooking the view … what could be better?" (116). The interactive questioning also feeds in useful information: "there is a huge range of styles" for Rosé so "[g]rape variety is usually a good guide", and "increasingly we are seeing […] even […] Chambourcin" (116). Rosé is set next to a Bouillabaisse recipe, and, empathetically, Milan and Corney acknowledge that the traditional fish soup "can be intimidating" (116). Succinctly incorporated into the recipes are simple greyscale graphs of grape "Flavour Profiles" delineating the strength on the front and back palate and tongue (103).Imaging and DesigningThe cover of Moran’s cookbook in its first edition reproduces the colours of 1930–1940's beach towels, umbrellas or sunshades in matt stripes of blue, yellow, red, and green (Australian beaches traditionally have a grass verge; and, I am told (Costello), these were the colours of his restaurant Panoroma’s original upholstery). A second edition has the same back cover but a generic front cover shifting from the location of his restaurant to the food in a new subtitle: "From Bush to Beach and onto Your Plate". The front endpapers are Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach where Panoroma restaurant is embedded on the lower wall of an old building of flats, ubiquitous in Bondi, like a halved avocado, or a small shallow elliptic cave in one of the sandstone cliff-faces. The cookbook’s back endpapers are his bush-shack country. Surfaces, cooking equipment, table linen, crockery, cutlery and glassware are not ostentatious, but simple and subdued, in the colours and textures of nature/culture: ivory, bone, ecru, and cream; and linen, wire, wood, and cardboard. The mundane, such as a colander, is highlighted: humbleness elevated, hands at work, cooking as an embodied activity. Moran is photographed throughout engaged in cooking, quietly fetching in his slim, clean-cut, short-haired, altar-boyish good-looks, dressed casually in plain bone apron, t-shirt (most often plain white), and jeans. While some recipes are traditionally constructed, with the headnote, the list of ingredients and the discursive instructions for cooking, on occasion this is done by a double-page spread of continuous prose, inviting you into the story-telling. The typeface of Simmer varies to include a hand-written lookalike. The book also has a varied layout. Notes and small images sit on selected pages, as often as not at an asymmetric angle, with faux tape, as if stuck there as an afterthought—but an excited and enthusiastic afterthought—and to signal that what is informally known is as valuable as professional knowledge/skill and the tried, tested, and formally presented.Lamont’s publishers have laid out recipe instructions on the right-hand side (traditional English-language Western reading is top down, left to right). But when the recipe requires more than one item to be cooked, there is no repeated title; the spacing and line-up are not necessarily clear; and some immediate, albeit temporary, confusion occurs. Her recipes, alongside images of classic fine dining, carry the implication of chefing rather than cooking. She is photographed as a professional, with a chef’s familiar striped apron, and if she is not wearing a chef’s jacket, tunic or shirt, her staff are. The food is beautiful to look at and imagine, but tackling it in the home kitchen becomes a secondary thought. The left-hand section divider pages are meant to signal the wines, with the appropriate colour, and repetitive pattern of circles; but I understood this belatedly, mistaking them for retro wallpaper bemusedly. On the other hand, Powell’s bog-in-don’t-wait everyday heartiness of a communal stewed dinner at a medieval inn (Peasy Lamb looks exactly like this) may be overcooked, and, without sensuousness, uninviting. Images in Lamont’s book tend toward the predictable and anonymous (broad sweep of grape-vined landscape; large groups of people with eating and drinking utensils). The Lamont family run a vineyard, and up-market restaurants, one photographed on Perth’s river dockside. But Sean's Panoroma has a specificity about it; it hasn’t lost its local flavour in the mix with the global. (Admittedly, Moran’s bush "shack", the origin of much Panoroma produce and the destination of Panoroma compost, looks architect-designed.) Powell’s book, given "rump" and "rough" in the title, stridently plays down glitz (large type size, minimum spacing, rustic surface imagery, full-page portraits of a chicken, rump, and cabbage etc). While not over-glam, the photography in Balance may at first appear unsubtle. Images fill whole pages. But their beautifully coloured and intriguing shapes—the yellow lime of a white-wine bottle base or a sparkling wine cork beneath its cage—shift them into hyperreality. White wine in a glass becomes the edge of a desert lake; an open fig, the jaws of an alien; the flesh of a lemon after squeezing, a sea anemone. The minimal number of images is a judicious choice. ConclusionReading can be immersive, but it can also hover critically at a meta level, especially if the writer foregrounds process. A conversation starts in this exchange, the reader imagining for themselves the worlds written about. Writers read as writers, to acquire a sense of what good writing is, who writing colleagues are, where writing is being published, and, comparably, to learn to judge their own writing. Writing is produced from a combination of passion and the discipline of everyday work. To be a writer in the world is to observe and remember/record, to be conscious of aiming to see the narrative potential in an array of experiences, events, and images, or, to put it another way, "to develop the habit of art" (Jolley 20). Photography makes significant whatever is photographed. The image is immobile in a literal sense but, because of its referential nature, evocative. Design, too, is about communication through aesthetics as a sensuous visual code for ideas or concepts. (There is a large amount of scholarship on the workings of image combined with text. Roland Barthes is a place to begin, particularly about photography. There are also textbooks dealing with visual literacy or culture, only one example being Shirato and Webb.) It is reasonable to think about why there is so much interest in food in this moment. Food has become folded into celebrity culture, but, naturally, obviously, food is about our security and survival, physically and emotionally. Given that our planet is under threat from global warming which is also driving climate change, and we are facing peak oil, and alternative forms of energy are still not taken seriously in a widespread manner, then food production is under threat. Food supply and production are also linked to the growing gap between poverty and wealth, and the movement of whole populations: food is about being at home. Creativity is associated with mastery of a discipline, openness to new experiences, and persistence and courage, among other things. We read, write, photograph, and design to argue and critique, to use the imagination, to shape and transform, to transmit ideas, to celebrate living and to live more fully.References Allen, Max. The Future Makers: Australian Wines for the 21st Century. Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2010. Barratt, Virginia. “verbiage very thinly sliced and plated up real nice.” Assignment, ENG10022 Writing from the Edge. Lismore: Southern Cross U, 2009. [lower case in the title is the author's proclivity, and subsequently published in Carson and Dettori. Eds. Banquet: A Feast of New Writing and Arts by Queer Women]Costello, Patricia. Personal conversation. 31 May 2012. Curti, Lidia. Female Stories, Female Bodies: Narrative, Identity and Representation. UK: Macmillan, 1998.Derrida, Jacques. "Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword." Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume. Eds. Andreas Apadakis, Catherine Cook, and Andrew Benjamin. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.Halliday, James. “An Artist’s Spirit.” The Weekend Australian: The Weekend Australian Magazine 13-14 Feb. (2010): 31.Jolley, Elizabeth. Central Mischief. Ringwood: Viking/Penguin 1992. Lamont, Kate. Wine and Food. Perth: U of Western Australia P, 2009. Milan, Lyndey, and Corney, Colin. Balance: Matching Food and Wine: What Works and Why. South Melbourne: Lothian, 2005. Moran, Sean. Let It Simmer. Camberwell: Lantern/Penguin, 2006. Ostmann, Barbara Gibbs, and Jane L. Baker. The Recipe Writer's Handbook. Canada: John Wiley, 2001.Powell, Greg Duncan. Rump and a Rough Red. Millers Point: Murdoch, 2010. Shirato, Tony, and Jen Webb. Reading the Visual. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004.

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. 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