The endless snapping of modern office life continues at my heels.
Ever more,  ways of convincing me that revering back to childhood would be a good move are thrust in front of me under the guise of being important. 


A warning for those on the edge of becoming a grown up, those who desire to be older...stop.Once you start, you cannot stop. You will never be able to get back to who you are now no matter how much you're convinced you can by those wanting to sell you lifestyles.You will learn too much and it will blight you. 


It is the grown up world and it will darken your soul....

Looking for Over Exposed..

The Peaks, it's Summer,




The weather is surprisingly hot and sunny  for this part of England which attracts rain and cloud like a  magnet and as a consequence, the normally sponge like hill that is Bleaklow is wearing a dried out crust. Instead of clinging wet peat, our boots are covered in a fine silvery dust that makes it look as though we're walking on the surface of The Moon. We've walked up from the Glossop side and along with the usual reasons for an extended day out on a hill, we have a another incentive to endure the swelter and discomfort of this most humid of days. Today, we're looking for something.


We walk down  into a grough  and before long, our line of sight in all directions is cut off by its
high sides. Peat groughs  always make me think of the trenches of The First World War  and I not for the first time, I expect us to come across a group of weary faced  Tommies preparing to go over the top for one last push. Disappointingly, as it always is, we don't, instead the sides quickly slope down and we're back in the open again.
 Time for a quick drink , a map stop and a discussion on how best to tackle the next part of the treasure hunt.We're close but because of the groughs  that scare the hill top, we could easily miss our prize.


We agree that it would be best to spread out, in a  straight line fifty feet or so apart. This we do and as  the search begins I'm reminded of the black and white  news reels I've seen of grim faced men searching for other things on the tops of these moors.This doesn't stay with me long though as the ground under my feet and the laughing and raised curses of the others brings me back to our own search. We continue on and because of the way the hill is, we soon start to lose sight of one another as one or more  of us descends into a gully or finds himself faced with a steep drop in to a dried up stream bed. 


Suddenly, we're all  in the open again and one of us is shouting and waving his arms. The rest of us hurry towards him  to see what he's making all the fuss about. Eventually, we all crowd around him and look to where he's pointing.There, at his feet, a piece of dull metal, aluminium, tarnished by age and the peat it's been lying in for over fifty years but unmistakable as part of what we've come looking for. As we glance around we see more, scattered all over ,shiny and twisted, contrasting against the dark greyness of the peat. We round the corner of a shallow rise and suddenly there it is,the thing we've come to find on the top of this desolate and isolated Peak District giant, the  last resting place of one of the largest aircraft of The Second World War , a B29 Super Fortress.


 As  I stand and look at it, I'm  struck by how much it looks like a ship wreck. The way the massive engine casings stand out from the peat  fills my head with grainy images of ships I've seen lying on the floor of The Ocean and how all these years after, they've become part of the ecosystem, colonised by its dwellers,new life all over them. This is where the biggest difference is with what's in front of me .
This is like looking at bones, bleached and dry sticking up through the earth. Exposed to the elements for over fifty years, there's no life springing out of the chaos of  these remains.


There's so much to take in. The more I look around the more I  can see. A large part of a wing,  a frame of a  chair with shreds of leather still attached, so many tiny pieces of silver bent out of shape by impact and the intense heat  the crash caused. Undercarriage, huge pieces of metal just lying half submerged in the peat . I  crouch down and my eye catches a strip of electrical cable with bare frayed ends of copper showing, still bright .I pick it up and it's still flexible and for a split second, I think about putting it in  my pocket. I don't , suddenly my mind is full of the tales I've heard about what as befallen those who've removed stones and so on from such places, the bad often terrible things that have happened to them until the item is returned.  I put it back and stand up.


 A couple of us are reading the words on the small memorial that's been built on the site. It's been visited regularly by the looks of it.Last November's poppy wreathes show that, along with several previous ones and various individual tokens of remembrance. The weather in The Peak District  on the other hand doesn't show respect to anyone so by now, they're all faded, bled out and scattered by indifferent winds.


I move towards the  remains of one of the engines and let my fingers trace over the pitted surface. As I do, I think about when this aircraft was alive, " Over Exposed" . She flew through the deep blue of Pacific skies and captured the image of the mushroom cloud, a first hand witness to the beginning of the Atomic Age. I'm struck ,again, by how events lead us to our final destination and what we do or don't on the way, what happens to us between the first and last breath. None of those on board her thought it would be their final flight but circumstance had other ideas.

I let my fingers linger on the decaying metal because I want to take something from it, some sense of a connection with the past. All things are connected, whether we can see it or not. Then affects the now and so on, not just the big happenings that The World sees but the small unnoticed things.We don't see them because we're too busy dealing with what's in front of us. I run my fingers around the opening of one of the piston chambers, my touch , like that of those before me, slowly wearing away the physical until nothing remains.


I go back to the rest and our conversation is affected by the place until laughter  brings us back to the present . We decide to sit and eat, spend some time here before we continue our struggle with this, the most unforgiving of all the hills.