"Come Brighten My Northern Sky"...

...Wonderful - perhaps the best - song by dear Nick Drake.

My Northern skies have, though, not this week been of the greatest. Leaden grey throughout, all camera equipment left languishing in the bag unneeded on voyage sadly.

Traveling to one Northern fastness on distant parochial duty, detouring back through another, one has been. R the first - drear and desperately run down. Magnificent views surrounding of Lancashire moorland, but within the place little but signs of physical poverty and a certain endemic ruin. Even the shops that were open and not boarded up were down-at-heel and thoroughly uninviting.

The church office where I was to pitch up is next to a grubby lightly-grassed and heavily strewn with rubbish area - called for some reason a 'park'. "Don't arrive too early," one was told. "You'll only be asked for money, drugs or sex." (The latter on a strictly cash on delivery basis of course.) As it happens, I was beforehand - hate being late for meetings - but to my considerable chagrin not one of the early-bird derelicts troubled me for anything.

Must be the dog-collar I imagine. Seems on occasion - this being one of them - to act almost as a Klingon cloaking shield rendering me invisible. Handy in those particular circs., but not on the whole something I relish. Up close and personal should the parson be. Rather as Robert Capa would say of photographs: "If your pictures are no good, you're not close enough."

Coming back down one passed through H on the other side of the Pennines. At risk of stirring up another War of the Roses I can only comment that it looked wonderful. No time to step out and sample any local accostings mind you.

And in between a passage across Saddleworth Moor. If you are of that generation it will forever be a name and place associated with Brady, Hindley and terrible, terrible evil. I am and it is. The sky is forever dark above that place, howsoever much the sun may shine. There is, though, one bright shaft there somewhere - a light from heaven that invisibly illumines the unknown resting place of Keith Bennett. His Mother can see it now from her eternal vantage point.

Her Northern Sky has been brightened at last.