Spring is waiting in the wings

The little yellow flowered strawberry

We walked down Treloan lane again today in full autumn attitude. I would guess that with the strong winds we’ve been having here, half of the leaves are down and bare branches are the norm, silhouetted against an unexpectedly blue sky; a midwinter Chinese blue sky – pale cobalt as featured on the best porcelaine pots. Is this an Indian summer? We were in the cafe at the bottom of the lane when a couple of walkers came in. His T-shirt was soaked in sweat; it’s mid October so yes, this is a bit of an Indian summer.

I guess the default position for autumn would be to switch our attention from plants to fungi, but in spite of a lot of excitable pre-publicity, it doesn’t yet appear to be much of a bumper year for fungi. Our total haul today was a couple of small horse mushrooms under a tree. We left them where they were, mainly because it’s surprisingly hard to distinguish them from yellow staining mushrooms, and because they were heaving with maggots.

So all of our attention was on the basal rosettes and the few plants in flower. We were (as always) looking for promises of spring before winter really begins.  Years ago I was greatly cheered by realizing that the sticky buds on horse chestnut trees are real buds just waiting to open and release their lovely candlestick flowers and new leaves. These days, being old and full of words it would all be blah blah if I let it ; but I don’t want to lose that sense of excitement in the changing seasons. I’ve come to realize that the seasons don’t pass like a string of sausages but each one births the next. 

Of course there are always the usual suspects if you’re looking for a splash of colour on a walk. Could there be any scarlet and yellow to equal an elderly blackberry leaf putting on a final show of glory after the foragers have left? The red campions and herb Robert can usually be relied on for even a winter walk, and – well – dandelions; ubiquitous and difficult to nail down even for the trainspotter tendency. But it’s the “surely nots” that make us stop and kneel for a closer look. Yesterday it was a yellow flowered strawberry – deep within the undergrowth – and next to it a single fruit, bright red and ready to fall into the ground. It could have been the earliest or the latest celandine I’d ever seen until I noticed the fruit. We met a Danish woman on the same walk several years ago who insisted that at home they made jam with them but I wasn’t sure if she was thinking about Potentilla indica or the true wild strawberry whose fruit looks very similar. The yellow flower is the giveaway, but of course you need to have seen the plant through a whole season to know that.

It’s interesting to recall chance meetings in the same place. Yesterday we chatted to a couple on a bike ride who’d once worked at the big house which, at the time, was owned by a retired Chancellor of the Exchequer who sold it for £3 million. Recently, after a spell as a posh wedding venue it was sold for £12.5 million. In a gushing piece in Country Life it was described as “unique in owning a large length of foreshore”. It’s an interesting concept, and fascinating to reflect on whether a deed of title could add anything at all to the pleasure of sitting on a log and contemplating the sea. But whatever turns you on.  We also once had an amusing encounter with a couple whose local accent I recognised at once as from South Gloucestershire. As we chatted about our shared experiences near the river Severn they began to talk about a pretty dreadful character – the Vicar who’d taken the pews out – and we realized they were talking about me. There was an amusing moment when they did a full reverse ferret and we went our separate ways. 

Another yellow flower caught Madame’s eye. It was an uncharacteristically small nipplewort plant enjoying the last warm sunshine. I did a bit of research later to try to find out the origin of the name. So often plants have gathered names via the medieval doctrine of signatures which had a benevolent god designing every plant with a clue to its healing properties. The flask shaped flowers of nipplewort are a bit of an imaginary stretch – they look far more like the grease nipples on old steam engines to me, but my vocabulary of nipples is a bit limited. In short, though, the nipplewort was used for cracked skin and soreness in the past and even today it has a place in expensive face creams.

So aside from occasional flowers the main pleasure of the walk in autumn is the pristine rosettes and basal leaves of plants waiting their turn for spring. One of the most interesting things I’ve learned about nature is the succession of flowers in hedgerows. It is quite wonderful that the hedgerow in spring isn’t the static joy that we often see when we don’t look. It’s like one of those country circle dances where everyone changes places. The carrot family are the stars of the show as each appears, flowers and dies back allowing the next cousin to shine for a couple of weeks. Among the detritus, skeletal remains and leaves of the last season we found a multitude of shoots of three cornered garlic. 

Treloan Lane is one of our all time favourite walks. We’re getting a bit old for yomping across difficult tracks for miles but the enforced slowness brings its own joys. Small really is beautiful, and one and a half miles of Cornish lane can beat many more popular wildflower habitats into a cocked hat.

Slow down!

Druce Cranesbill, Geranium X oxonianum, probably ssp ‘Lace Time’ in hedge on lane entering Portscatho

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a piece under the title “slow down”. I did a search just now and I last wrote a piece under that title three years ago, but I’ve explored the concepts on many more occasions. It’s really no more complicated an idea than saying that the slower you walk the more you see; blindingly obvious but in a culture where our personal sense of worth is run by the clock, by targets and by personal bests, crippling to our inner lives.

However the antidote to this dilemma isn’t outsourcing our inner lives to TV celebrities on carefully curated road trips across the earth. You don’t need a full film crew, a fleet of SUV’s and a budget of £100,000 to find nature because it’s there, right next to you. Even if you’re sitting at a desk it’s there, growing under your toenails and eating your favourite woolen pullover.

By the way, in an effort to sound more like a proper influencer, dare I suggest that an 18th century Japanese raku bowl (available from me, of course) and filled with keratin rich armpit hair is the cure for clothes moths that everyone is talking about. No? possibly not, then.

Some “bonking beetles” on Hogweed.

Take a tip from a real expert – no not me – from a child. What do we (did we) find ourselves saying to our children most often? Wasn’t it “Oh do come on!” as we, ever anxious to keep to the unwritten itinerary of the day, try to rush them past something we regard as trivial, like a Dandelion, or some beetles on a weed – so we can get home and open a bottle as soon as we’ve got them to bed. I write from experience!

But children don’t see the world in the same way that we do, with our stratified hierarchies of significance. If we were to sit still for five minutes and think about the way we see the world through our overrated adult eyes we’d perhaps realize that we’ve been schooled in not seeing because seeing soaks up a lot of time and energy. We don’t see street beggars and poverty, we don’t see old people (it might be catching), we don’t see what’s happening in the world because it gives us a headache, we don’t see that society has become deeply and dangerously unequal. We especially don’t see the rapid erosion of nature. We don’t notice the starlings no longer fly in murmurations over Redcliffe church, we don’t notice that those lovely Mexican Fleabanes have been weedkilled or scraped off the pavements. In fact we’d rather think that the city would be a better place if we gave it a bit of ruthless tidying. Let’s divide nature into weeds and pests versus window boxes. Children don’t make that mistake so readily unless they’ve been incarcerated in front of the idiot’s lantern (my grandfather’s name for television). We live, mentally, in -left-over from the war – concrete pill boxes and see the earth through a slit just wide enough to poke a rifle through. 

But imagine, for a moment, becoming a child again and switching off the filters for an hour or two and seeing the earth as it is, even in its depleted current state, in all its glory. Let’s use the idea of seeing promiscuously. Everything, all at once, in a riot of sound and colour, unedited or curated by our parents, our teachers, our neighbours and by what we call common sense which may be common but it lacks much sense. A child’s world is full of glory.  I remember the spiritual director Kenneth Leach once saying in a talk that doxa is the (ancient) Greek word for glory, and so orthodox at its heart means “right glory”. The beginnings of a green spirituality can be found in those revelatory moments when the earth speaks, pins us to the spot to see some tiny thing filled with beauty. Beauty and truth are soulmates. 

Today we went down to St Anthony’s Head and sat on a bench situated on a huge and redundant gun emplacement looking across to Falmouth where we once lived for a year, and the Lizard beyond, one of my treasured plant hunting grounds. Something special grows there now and then. It’s an orchid called Autumn Ladies’ Tresses, Spiranthes spiralis. It hasn’t been recorded there for a couple of years and it’s rather late in the year to see it in flower but since we were there I had a hunt around anywhere I could see a possible spot, but nothing. Sometimes glory takes its time and we need to be patient; but patience is easy when you’re engulfed by the sound of the sea and the sight of so many happy memories. Madame said “it’s good that we can see this together”.  “Stop it” I thought, “you’ll make me go all emotional!”

Great spotted woodpecker outside the kitchen window.

Back in Treloan Lane

You’ll notice the difference in formatting in this piece. Apologies, I’ll correct it when WordPress restores my access to my own site.

Our journey down here was a bit of a nightmare. It wasn’t just the usual kind of rain but a malignant blanket of fine drizzle that forced us to use the fastest wiper setting, which drummed back and forth like a pair of demented festival goers. In heavy rain even the landscape and the roadsigns disappear as lorries pass leaving con-trails of greasy spray and we passed our usual stopping place and drove towards the next which was on the northern side of Bodmin Moor. The moor is a moody place at the best of times but this time it wasn’t snow, sleet or driving rain, it was like driving through a ghostly white tunnel. When eventually we found a service station, filling the tank was a literally immersive experience, being battered by the horizontal drizzle blowing in sideways. Luckily I was wearing my favourite, moth eaten oiled Welsh Black woollen jumper which kept the worst of it out and I steamed dry in the car as we drove the last eighty miles. Our destination was a hay loft which we’d seen being converted for a couple of years and we rented it on a whim after a long season of hospital trips and building work. 

We’ve been walking down this lane for years; it’s one of four places whose plants I know pretty well. One and a half miles each way, it combines tarmac, grassy path and a small section of sunken track – but its composition; sunken for most of its length between high banks, hedges and Cornish banks has obviously evolved alongside its surrounding culture as fishing declined and farming rose and then tourism came along and insisted that the access to the holiday cottages did not jeopardize the paintwork of the family car. Normally at this point I’d insert the picture of flail-mower butchery that greeted us a few years ago but a hiccough in WordPress has got me locked out and you’re reading this via a circuitous workaround which can’t cope with photos; so that demanded a bit of  change in writing style as I try to say with words what I would otherwise have served up on a photographic plate. I had a cataract removed five weeks ago and once the swelling had cleared up and the double vision resolved, I found myself in a startlingly new world. I’ve mentioned this to other people who’ve had lens replacements and it seems we all experience an almost psychedelic period of colour and sharpness. Even Sainsbury’s car park looked amazing in the sunshine. I was captivated by the sharp edges of the cars. As soon as I was cleared to drive by the hospital we came here to a characteristically misty and rainy Cornwall for a bit of R&R.

It’s in the nature of sunken lanes that they provide a sheltered environment for all manner of plants, insects and animals. Here on the lane there are some of the richest hedgerows we’ve ever seen. My biggest problem for several years was that the cataract in my right, dominant, eye meant that I was unable to clearly resolve the things I was looking at. I’d pretty much decided that this was due to a faulty prescription, but it’s obvious now that a semi transparent film covering the lens was the real problem. Back here in Cornwall I was hoping that my greatly improved vision would allow me to see as well as the camera linked to a large screen hi-res monitor. Wow! Now, with the inspiration of improved eyesight and the opportunity presented by WordPress problems has prompted another big think …… how can I better express in words what I see as we walk slowly down the lane?

But there’s a catch here because I normally use carefully composed photographs which are rich in technical information that I can take to the identification guides without exposing the complexities of the process. It’s a hidden scientific process based on data and measurements and precise observations – all as boring as a bad preacher on a rainy Sunday to the average reader because the photo doesn’t need to brag about its contents But the writer’s tools are very different; bafflingly metaphorical to a scientist; woolly and suggestive rather than descriptive. You get the picture I hope. We’re dealing with two different languages and cultures, like trying to describe love in a spreadsheet populated only by temperatures and breathing rates. 

So back to the lane where we stopped to admire a cone from a felled Monterey Pine, covered in foliose lichen, the living expression of a fibonacci spiral but not designed by a mathematician but rather circumstance and evolution. A little further up the lane the hedge is covered with Old Man’s Beard, now covering the hedge with a snowlike cloak. But stepping forwards from the path to take a much closer look, you can see the stunningly beautiful mop-heads of seeds whose feathery tops curl like punk hairstyles waiting for the wind to call them away to service somewhere else. Below them in the hedge a brave few Red Campions risk a flower; pale pink after a hard season. Ivy berries, terrific food for the birds and the bees are clinging like tiny green and black mustard pots to their vines. A little clump of Babington’s Leeks is still, just about surviving atop one of the Cornish hedges. They’re quite unusual and we were pleased to see them a couple of years ago. By this time we would have expected the bulbs to open up exposing the bulbils which grow shoots before dropping to the ground, This time they are dried up by the summer heat and drought. This little patch will probably die off unrecorded. As we stroll further down we see evidence of the first of the carrot family to appear in spring. Large green rosettes (and some with stems and leaves) are the promise of next year’s Alexanders. Later, returning up the lane we find some seedheads hanging on. They’re easy to identify because Alexanders, AKA Herb Gerard, is the only member of the family with black seeds. There’s Mugwort  growing along the length of the path – once used in brewing beer – hence the name – still in flower. Near the beach there are wild radishes and also sea radishes. Their leaves differ slightly, the sea radish has slightly thickened shiny and tougher leaves, like its neighbour the Sea Beet, but both have magnificent basal rosettes and slightly different numbers of seeds in their pods. Unfortunately for the purists they hybridize together freely – like the wild carrots – and it’s sometimes impossible to be sure which one you’ve found. Returning up the path after an ice cream we see an abundance of Winter Heliotrope which will flood the path with its peculiar almond scent in just a few weeks around Christmas. We see the beginnings of the Yarrow and the end of the Charlock; tall, crisp and dead against the sky and finally an exciting little find right at the bottom of the cornish hedge, with the stones catching the last heat of the sun – a small clump of Wood Calamint.

Did I say how much I love this place?

The miners and the herbalists of Cock Road.

Whether or not it’s some kind of syndrome I’ve never bothered to find out, but I’m a bit obsessive about lists, catalogues and picture dictionaries. The first book I ever truly loved – I can’t have been more than five or six years old – was a picture dictionary and recently I was shown an almost identical book in Welsh which I found very moving. So my memory is cluttered with a lot of fragmentary information on random subjects from embroidery silks, ships, artists’ materials and above all plants. I collect floras and Herbals these days but I rarely throw a seed catalogue away because I love the names of plants and their varieties. Cider apple trees are a particular favourite. Where else could you find a variety called “Slack ma Girdle“, which shares a group name with a number of cousins known as Woodbine, often but not always associated with Honeysuckle. As you see, the brain rot is advanced. Words are my crack cocaine.

All of which is a long-winded explanation to account for my memory of a Herbalist’s catalogue which I saw in the early 1970’s and which advertised a remedy called “Golden Seal” accompanied by testimonials which, unforgettably, gave a grisly account by a satisfied customer who had “coughed up a tumour” only a week after starting a course of treatment. And so it lingers in my mind among the uncatalogued memories in the folder marked “hell’s teeth!” However the problem with these unpursued thoughts and memories is that they bide their time and – like the devil – wait for an opportune moment. Opportunity knocked for Goldenseal last week after many years of gestation as I was cataloguing some photographs which I took in mid-Wales a couple of years ago of a Goldenrod plant which was abundant around the old gold mine at Dolaucothi. It’s at the top of this piece. Somehow my brain had managed to scramble Goldenrod and Goldenseal and so the plant with its deeply dubious reputation had got itself (virtually) filed in the wrong place – which didn’t matter until I thought about it. But you know what thinking does.

And so I moved from a casual word association to a determined search through the books and the internet to disambiguate the two plants which involved two fascinating diversions into law and history. Both plants were extensively used by First Nation and Native American cultures and both are still in use today around the world albeit for different purposes. They don’t belong to the same family; Goldenrod is as a member of the Asteraceae, Daisy family; and Golden Seal is in the Buttercups, the Ranunculaceae. Goldenrod is used to make a tea and is used as a diuretic and astringent. It was once called Liberty Tea by American settlers in the independence movement and was used among many other things for staunching bleeding or burns. Gerard of Gerard’s Herbal fame writes that it was taken as a medicine for stab wounds and cuts (one of its Somerset names was Woundwort which is a quite different plant) and Geoffrey Grigson – my favourite chronicler of English plants – reports that during early medieval times it was gathered and sold at fabulous prices (half a Crown an ounce) due to the amount of “stabbing and thrusting” going on. It fell out of favour and later on Gerard says you could by a hundredweight of Goldenrod at the same price. Given that it’s a 5 minute bus ride to the Royal United Hospital A&E I think I would give it a miss. Mrs Grieve gives it her approval in the 1930’s and relates a fanciful and alarming report of a boy who, following treatment passed 15 large bladder stones up to one and a half ounces in 1788. I don’t know what to think about the suffering involved were it true. It’s still sold and used for a range of purposes and even appears in the 1983 British Herbal Pharmacopoeia. It appears to meet most of the purposes it’s recommended for without dangerous side effects.

That, however takes me back to the starting point for this piece because Golden Seal (Hydrastis canadensis) has a wholly different history. My first encounter in a herbalist’s catalogue led to my misidentification and the horror stories about coughing up tumours. A very easy Gemini search established that KIngswood, now a suburb of East Bristol but back then still in Gloucestershire near where I was born, was a hotspot for Herbalists warehouses. None of them now exist in their original form, but it may be important to mention that Kingswood was also on the South Gloucestershire Coalfield and had its own mines and miners. It was said that the miners of Cock Road were instrumental in the sacking of Bristol Prison and burning down the Mansion House during the Bristol Riots while supporting the Reform movement. It was all to no avail; the middle classes who’d refused to turn out for the militia got the vote and the miners got pneumoconiosis (the Dust). Consequently herbal remedies for chronic lung disease including Tuberculosis which my paternal granny died from would have found an eager audience for the snake oil salesmen who were ever too happy to make a quick buck out of suffering. I’m not in any way against herbal (phyto) medicine, in fact I’ve found it interesting enough to mix up some basic simple remedies for myself but as any internet enquiry will warn you – it’s not always safe to believe everything you read online.

So back to Golden Seal; it too gets a positive mention in all of my herbals up to and including the 1983 British Herbal Pharmacopoeia, which means it’s been verified, tested and safe for use which, lets be fair, may still not mean its as effective as the treatment the doctor offers. What could never have been acceptable were the outrageous claims for anti-cancer properties made, up until the late twenty sixties, which have since then been regulated and banned in the UK. Golden Seal is normally prescribed for problems with the mucous membranes such as lungs, stomach and bowel disorders and like several other members of the same plant family was once used to progress childbirth – which means it should never be used during pregnancy. Many herbal remedies have been isolated and synthesised and now find a home in regular medicine but there are still people who think that phytomedicine is somehow closer to nature and less dangerous. In some cases that may be true but equally it may be a dangerous risk – which leads me to one final point.

Herbalists and their suppliers are now regulated to control untested use of potentially dangerous medicines -where the therapeutic dose may be milligrams away from the fatal one. But one area which lacks any kind of legal (or self) control is the internet and its battalions of influencers, who are often paid to promote dangerous procedures and products just as did the herbalists of Kingswood. I find it unbelievable that influencers can now promote lethal nonsense that would be illegal in print.

The wild world is a wonderful gift to us, and if and when(ever) cancer cures are found, the chances are they will have begun as an interesting plant compound or even an account in an ancient manuscript that provokes – as it did with me – a little bit of research. I’ve written before about the dangers of foraging and eating plants without adequate background understanding, and the same applies to herbal medicine. In untrained hands it’s as dangerous as connecting your household mains to the lamp-post outside. Come to think of it, that’s illegal too!

“Sir, I’ve lost me daps!”

This is a very rare photograph of Father Christmas’s footprints exiting the chimney about 14 years ago. You’ll also see how tired he must have been because he left the reindeer’s carrot behind although he drank the glass of wine and left a thank-you note on borrowed paper. What you probably won’t know unless you come from Gloucestershire, Bristol, North Somerset or South Wales is that he was wearing daps (you can tell by the shape of the prints) because – so my Dad told me years ago – he didn’t want to wake anyone up. Unless you come from one of those related areas you’ll have no idea what daps are in any case; they’re what posh people call plimsolls, thereby setting themselves apart from us. We are also almost the last redoubt of the glottal stop although we have no idea when the rest of the world lost it. It’s hard to learn but a decent speech therapist might (I mean might ) teach to to say bu’er instead of butter (the apostrophe is where you close your larynx and grunt against your vocal cords. On the Bristol edge of Gloucestershire we despise all words ending in “a” and substitute “l” for instance in Africal. He becomes ‘ee- the differences are minute but unmistakable. We use the words “gert” (big) and “lush” (nice) but never together as outsiders tend to do when they try to get alongside us. When it comes to the letter “r” the problem is not so much learning it, but for a local to say anything with an “r” in it without letting their true identity slip. It’s a well set snare for the Gloucestershire social climber. Lessons (in a small way) are available on the 39x bus to Bristol from Bath led by a recorded announcer who even manages to work a tiny glottal stop into Arno’s Court (as it appears in the timetable) but she says “Arnel’s Cor’t” adding the “t” as an afterthought to the minute g/s. I love her dearly and I would appreciate it if, next birthday, she would read me a bedtime story and make me feel young again. the Gloucestershire dialect is broad and generous, we even – and this is an absolute collector’s piece – have the soft mutation where the “t” in tram becomes “d” as in dram. A hangover from our surprisingly recent coal mining past.

This, of course is about the aftershocks of the cultural penny banger which followed my accidental lapse when speaking to a dog. In that piece – which is linked back above – I was puzzling on the extent to which my identity (most people’ identity) is tied up in language. I was born and brought up in Gloucestershire although the Local authorities conspired to move it into the Greater Bristol postcode, then Avon, and finally South Gloucestershire where it remains. So three different addresses without moving a yard. We who knew what daps were – and how to fox the PE teacher into letting you off games – were a people apart.

So what’s that all about? Well, a voice is a kind of signature; the signature of a local culture now barely audible except to eccentric wordsmiths like me. I don’t need reminding that AI can easily take my voice and get it to say unspeakable things; but if anyone who knew me heard me speaking that way they’d know it wasn’t me. I have a second password, and that’s my punctuation. You will notice that it’s really weird. Who uses so many hyphens, semi colons and far too many commas in writing? The semi colon is banned by every style guide except – I read somewhere – the Church Times. But through years of writing for radio slots, sermons and talks, punctuation has become the structure that glues the written content together. The punctuation manages the pace, the pauses and silences of my work so I can (as they used to say) “lift them off the page”.

At the top of each piece it says – “The Potwell Inn” a sort of anonymising conceit. Then if you hunt about a bit you’ll discover that this is written by someone who calls himself Dave Pole – but where’s the evidence? The evidence is in the voice, silly. It’s the one guarantee that this is written by me because it’s verifiable by anyone who’s heard me speak. This is by no means always a pleasure. I was once wandering around the supermarket chatting to people here and there when I was accosted by a women who said “are you Dave Pole?” Thinking she must have heard me on the radio I tried not to look too pleased that she’d recognized my voice. But she just said rather disappointedly – “Oh, I thought you were tall”.

I am not tall. I am short, old now, a bit fat and contain no silicone anywhere about my person so I wouldn’t feel confident enough to expose myself in visual form (yet). Video is a bit of a faff in any case, but the equipment I use for audio hardly weighs anything and sits on my desk next to the laptop which is very clever and frees me from the hard earned skill of cutting and joining bits of reel to reel tape together with a cutting block, razor blade and some special editing sticky tape.

So a slow move towards including a bit more audio in the Potwell Inn posts feels like a no-brainer. I started researching the kit I’d need in April, and it’s all sitting in front of me now. However, like the story of the Zen archer forgetting what a bow is, I can’t really start producing audio properly until I’ve stopped worrying about the kit and concentrate entirely on the words. But I’m as optimistic and excited as I was when I discovered clay – and Madame of course!.

For now it’s practice, practice , Practice while the Potwell Inn will meander on just the same like the river across the green but hopefully with less crap in it. .

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with a dog.

Well it wasn’t quite a conversation. I was holding a gate open for Madame when a dog – it was a Springer spaniel – rushed past me nose down, hoovering up a scent line as they do, head low and moving from side to side, tail held almost straight out in a don’t bother me, I’m busy – sort of fashion. I could see its owners about 30 yards back on the track and I said to the dog “Hello you”. The dog being otherwise engaged barely paused to look at me and stopped his forward dash, turned on a sixpence and ran back to his owners. I walked on with Madame and, maybe thirty yards later, a light went on in my head and I realized I’d not only spoken to the dog but I’d spoken in dialect. I was so taken by this slip (I’ve had many decades of practice at not slipping into dialect and I think it was because I was talking to a dog. “You” – used as a pronoun in Gloucestershire used to be confined to strangers and could be construed as faintly hostile. I worked as a labourer in an engineering company when I was about seventeen; after leaving school unceremoniously accompanied by the Headmaster who had me by the shirt collar. This company was in the process of moving from farm buildings to sheet metalworking and chemical engineering and highly skilled (coded) welders were worth their weight in gold. Twin brothers were the welding superstars; they’d both worked on pressure vessels in nuclear power stations and they were so indispensable to the company that they freely abused the managers with the most foul insults. I learned a great deal from them. Anyway, to get back to the point, they never addressed me as anything other than “you”. They would invariably greet me with a surly “alright you?” which absolutely did not require an answer.

But why the sudden “you”? was it because it still lives there unused in my everyday conversations? the bedrock language of my locality. It still seems very precious to me. When I go to the local sawmill to buy posts for the allotment, all the people on the counter speak like me – not like my dad who was Bristolian, or my mum who came from deepest Oxfordshire – but like the language of my childhood’ the language that A F Woodman our Music teacher would try to din out of us. “Boughten” was one of his pet hates. “Thee” and “thou” still had some lingering currency among our elders. When I hear it echoed today it moves me, makes me feel at home, because in its dropped aitches and extended aar sounds, in its you’s and thee’s and its overall timbre and slow pace it gives me a place, a location. Without a local accent of some kind, words are like bus stops without a grid reference – meaningless until you know where to find them. The minute particulars of pronunciation function like tags; they signal important information about the speaker and their message to any listeners who are attuned to the patterns. The last person I knew who spoke full Gloucestershire was Lenny Clark, a fine gardener who died a few years ago. The difference between you and thee , like the French tu and vous are important indicators of relationship and we’ve let them go, although the now redundant differences in speech still express the same divisions in society. Some like to imagine that people who cling to local speech patterns are slow witted and stupid. I think that those people who speak like politicians without giving any clue where they come from, and what background, what hinterland they have – are the true citizens of nowhere. When they appear on the national news I make tea because the voice of authority hides behind received pronunciation – it’s disembodied, bloodless. I don’t suppose there’s much trace of Gloucestershire in my voice these days but that’s where I come from.

There are two bits of data you need to plan any journey on a map. Firstly you need to know where North is but crucially you need to know exactly where you are, where the starting point is on the map. If a harbour is the place a hero sets out from, not knowing where you belong, where you’re starting from, means you’re lost as soon as you sail over the horizon.

I used to walk with a retired farmhand on the banks of the river Severn, and one day he amazed me by naming, with their local names, the fields almost a mile away on the far side of the river. When I speak, I speak with the ghostly voices of my dad, a railwayman; my mother, a dressmaker; my grandfather, a carpenter and smallholder; and all the people I’ve known – not least the already mentioned A F Woodman who taught me to love music, and Chris Levinson who introduced me to the Beat Poets. I went to a so-called technical school but listened to the voice of Chaucer read in its rich original dialect by another English teacher, and learned French from a teacher who seemed to have spent the war in France. There’s a lot of freight in a voice if you care to honour it, and none at all in the aetiolated speech of those who’ve left their history in the dustbin. Losing thee means we have no way of signalling a whole stage of human connection.

This is not in any sense an appeal to return to a kind of local tribalism but to escape the awful snobbery of the tribe which most often causes the trouble and whose dialect history has been brushed away by many coats of magnolia so they can advance in their social class. A truly diverse society wouldn’t insist on young people airbrushing their local dialects out of existence. We can all learn to hear each other. I barely speak a word of Welsh but even I can hear in a sentence or two whether the speaker is from North or South Wales , or Pembrokeshire, or somewhere in the borders west of the Severn, or from the Valleys where I once worked for a while running worker-writers’ workshops.

I called the dog “you” instinctively because we didn’t know one another. The dog, possibly understanding the nuance scooted back to its owner. I think that’s quite wonderful – how about thee?

The River Severn at Purton

The imagination doesn’t work with footnotes

We think – more of an informed guess, really, that this is an Arkansas Black apple tree. Very small but highly perfumed fruits.

In his famous 1961 book Weeds & Aliens Sir Edward Salisbury (1886–1978), an eminent British ecologist and a former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, described an informal experiment after returning home from a walk through the countryside. He noticed that the turn-ups of his woollen trousers were full of mud and burrs.

Instead of brushing the debris away, he scraped out the dirt from his trouser cuffs and planted it. Salisbury was surprised when the tiny amount of soil yielded over 300 individual plants representing more than 20 different species.

  • The answer to my question “who was it” – an AI question on Google Gemini

I thought I’d better own up to that bit of AI because it seems that some saddos enjoy knocking down writers because they’ve sailed too close to someone else’s writing. It seems that for that kind of tiny mind, every semicolon needs to be the sole unaided work of a single creative mind. Give me a break! the logosphere is one huge whirlpool of language forged and forgotten over millennia. I’ve been reading Alice Oswald’s new book “Rhapsody – a manifesto” and you would probably love it as much as me if you’re sick of the tired old clichés about solitary bohemians and geniuses and their entourages of critics, editors, gallerists and curators.

So I picked that story about Sir Edward Sainsbury’s trouser bottoms because it’s such a good illustration of the way in which creative minds really work. I go for a walk on the allotment with my mind open and alert while my metaphorical turn-ups fill with seeds for new posts. My botanical mind asks “who, what, where and when” but my creative mind asks “why”. Why has this Peruvian Apple landed on our plot and how did it get here? What does it mean? what’s it for?

We have robins which just love it when we break open the soil and expose grubs for them to feed their families. They’re very tame, and come to our feet unafraid even singing their minor key songs to us. Yes they’re highly territorial -we once had to evict a couple of fighting males from the fruit cage before they really damaged one another. There are many other birds on the allotment site and I speak to them all and clap my hands to scare off the pigeons from our cabbages. Occasionally a magpie will attempt to rag a nest nearby and the sky is full of spite and venom and alarm calls. One day I saw something moving in a hedge and I stopped to look closer. After a while a wren cautiously came to the edge and immediately hurried back into the shelter. I was taken aback by my unexpected love for it. I stop and consider that word, “love” – but enjoy; like; admire, don’t come close in intensity. It seems to me that most of those relationship terms demand reciprocation but it didn’t matter that my burst of love for the wren needed no response or even recognition on its part

Apples, on the other hand are a bit difficult because they’re so hard to give names to. Madame’s old boss, George Gilbert, could name the variety with ease – he’d lived and breathed them for a lifetime. For us, it means long searches in databases and through books written fifty or more years ago. The apple at the top was – we were told – a French variety called L’Abri Noir. We were never convinced, especially when I discovered that “abri” could be used for a carport. The romance rather drained out of that one . It was Belgian in any case. But the American Arkansas Black is a closer fit – and now we know its likely name it’s easier to treasure.

Apple trees have a distinctive shape. You wouldn’t think this could conceivably be contentious but I once had a bit of a row with a lecturer who scoffed at any thought that they had a distinctive form and rejected my black and white painting in house paint on a piece of cardboard. But he was wrong. There’s a distinctive downward curve in the branches that could be caused by the weight of apples season by season, or might be a genetically determined feature. Whatever the cause, it’s easy to pick out an apple tree by its shape – and a world in which creatures and plants are known and loved by name is a better place.

All of which comes back to Sir Edward Sainsbury’s trouser turn-ups. Of course we can take a walk; enjoy the sunshine and breathe the fresh air, return home and think”that was nice”. But a walk with the senses screwed up to eleven never returns home empty handed. Half the fun of writing a blog like this is opening the box of remembered treasures and stringing them together into some form of story. Narrative; the spinning of yarns, poems, songs, prayers and laments is fundamental to our humanity. Overheard remarks, captured glances, rich gossip, all contribute to our sense of who we are and occasionally comfort and hold us safe in times of crisis

The point of all this is that the creative imagination doesn’t work with rules, templates and footnotes. The creative mind is shamelessly jackdaw-ish. Always happy to take someone else’s insight and work it into something new. I always try my best to give credit to the originator of a borrowed phrase or idea, but sometimes they just come out of the flow. I’m pretty sure that some of my pieces have taken on a second existence on someone else’s site and I know for sure that the entire million plus words and thousand plus postings have been scraped into the large language AI models. It would be nice to have some acknowledgement as a source but I’d love it if it was shared with a credit and link to the Potwell Inn.

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One for sorrow two for joy ….

This is actually a photograph of some Sow Thistle flowerheads, I took it in June in Cornwall, but if you look carefully enough with the eye of imagination it might pass for an image of the two magpies squabbling over some nesting material that I once saw, squashed flat on the road joined beak to beak by the short length of dry grass they were fighting over. They were so utterly focused on their greedy rage that they failed to notice the oncoming (I like to think) bus. The image has never left me, and if I’d only managed to photograph it in those pre-mobile phone days I could have used it in a dozen ways. Think of the proverb He who goes out for revenge should first dig two graves – incidentally Confucius didn’t actually say it but it’s good advice in any case. Now, a couple of days on from the moment the memory popped uninvited into my mind, I honestly can’t remember the context. So much of what my mind throws up is like an out of context post-it note that’s been sitting on the fridge door for months. But there, a casual popup memory led to an equally casual flip though the photo files and suddenly I’m looking at the sow thistles and thinking about a literary character called Père Ubu, who was invented by Alfred Jarry in 1896, scandalized French theatregoers and launched Dadaism. Ubu is the kind of monstrous human who would casually take a life over a blade of dead grass. He is fat, ugly, stupid and psychopathic, which may remind you of a well known President but I couldn’t possibly comment. I wanted to write my compulsory thesis on Jarry when we were at Art school but the Principal, Clifford Ellis, who was blessed with a very linear imagination, told me that he knew everything there is to know about Jarry and there was nothing I could possibly write that would be of the least interest to him – and refused to let me write it. I went straight to the library and asked the librarian if she knew of any artist about whom there was only a single book and of whom I’d never heard. After a bit of bibliographical research she came up with Eugene Boudin. I had never seen any painting of his and the prospect of very little research combined with a surname that translated as blood pudding I was hooked. Sadly my Dadaist revenge passed unnoticed by the Great Man and even with a staggeringly silly deathbed scene I got an A grade. Some years later I finally saw Boudin’s paintings in the flesh and I loved them. All of which goes to demonstrate what a compost heap my mind is.

But to begin at the beginning (again), these two magpies managed to demonstrate that two does not always equate with joy and to stretch the elastic proverb even further Madame and I had three boys while I don’t recall ever seeing four magpies together. They’re such unpleasant birds – always ragging nests and killing fledglings. Their immaculate morning suits don’t fool me; they’re like right wing assassins dressed as gentlemen. Nature tells more than one story and some of them are very dark. The nursery rhyme who killed cock robin? fingers the sparrow but I reckon it was a hit by an anonymous magpie who fitted the sparrow up in order to start a riot in Cheltenham. It’s worth encouraging children to learn the nursery rhymes because they often love a bit of darkness, and in the process they’d learn the name of fourteen creatures not including one which is murderous but remains a shadowy behind the scenes wraith in my rendering. One for sorrow two for joy is a counting rhyme that might well appeal to a reluctant learner despite being slightly less accurate than Old Moore’s Almanac. Oranges and Lemons can give us a pigeons’ eye view of the parishes of central London – my granny was born near Bow and when I think of the rhyme I think of her, an orphan, and also the mysterious Bungalow Granny who lived in a wooden building behind the Crest, the cottage where my real granny lived. Could the solitary resident have been her adoptive mother or foster parent? There’s a story to be written even in a single name and location. The beechwood in which her shack stood is the mise en scène. Why were my sister and I never taken to meet her?

If my mind is a pinball machine it works in two ways. In flow moments I want the ball to blunder its way past every single coil generating thoughts and words as a tangible reward, but on bad days or in bad dreams I just want it do shimmy around every memory, lighting none and exciting no morbid connections. Consciousness is only suffering on the bad days. The Buddha was wrong. The good days are festival days where sweet apples fall into my hand and consciousness is joy.

I guess the world in which we live is as much made by memories, recollections and, above all, language, as it is by the processes of nature. The two processes, language and nature are indivisible. We can only understand the natural world by exploring it from the inside because we are human and therefore part of it. The disciplines we can use to find our way pay no attention to boundaries and no particular approach, whether scientific or creative, can claim squatters rights or legal tenure.

Isaac Newton was into alchemy, William Blake and JMW Turner seem to have got there through visionary gifts, Tracey Emin has gone deeper than most living artists in exploring what it’s like to be human, and what about Amsel Kiefer who walks the darker path? What is the nature of Nature? RS Thomas wrote memorably of finding a depression in the grass still warm from the body of an unseen hare. Perhaps the illumination always comes from the unexpected, from left-field, from stopping worrying, from putting aside ceaseless questions and waiting in silence. Sometimes it takes years.

I suddenly realized that this tree could be Granny Perrin’s Nest.

Looking out of the bedroom window yesterday morning I had a small scale revelation; nothing huge but more of a bicycle tyre lever, gently easing an old memory off the rim in search of a leak. There’s a tall tree, a couple of roads north of the flat, and which rises above the roof line. I’ve no idea what species it is; it could be a Lombardy poplar – but without ever hauling it into consciousness I’ve been using it for years as a weather forecaster. There’s a companion met office rival a bit further away; the church clock on Julian Road which you can only hear chiming in a northeasterly wind. But yesterday, and returning to the tree, I could see it being bent by a gusty southwesterly wind – and that simple observation is the gateway to a great deal of useful information to a gardener. In itself that’s a mundane thought but a moment later the phrase “Granny Perrin’s nest” popped into my mind and my memory dropped into time travel mode.

Granny Perrin’s nest is an expression my Mum used to use when my sister and I stayed in our grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns. Mum would look up at some unfathomable point in the sky and say – “there’s rain over Granny Perrin’s nest”. As a child with a seedling poetic imagination it was a phrase of great beauty; pregnant with incomprehensible meaning but clearly something I would need to understand if I was ever going to be a grown-up. Yesterday I looked it up on Google Gemini just in case – in my eightieth year – it might finally crack the code and print the admission ticket.

I was completely taken aback by the result. This is a phrase that I’ve mentioned a number of times in this blog, and – here and there – I’ve mentioned childhood memories of The Crest – the cottage my grandfather built and the smallholding where I learned about nineteenth century farming at first hand. As I looked at the computer screen every word I’ve ever written about it had been scraped and stored by AI and, far more troubling, augmented by some local information and kneaded into a narrative with a completely spurious authority. My childhood memories refined and curated by a machine and spewed out as facts. I felt a bit violated to be honest; as if the AI had forensically scraped my childhood off the pavement and reconstructed an unwise night out at the pub. All the bits were there but they weren’t me. No lights lit up. I would never have joined those dots in the way that the machine did because there was none of the fuzzy logic of the mind. My Mum was missing; my grandfather with his unbuttoned shirt and jacket full of burn holes from the roll-ups that lived in the corner of his mouth; my Granny sweating and cursing over the paraffin stove; the chickens, Charlie the toad in the greenhouse. I suppose I should give credit to the suggestion that Granny Perrin’s nest referred to a tall elm, and support for my memory that there were still a few red squirrels but none of these were my memories. I only remember the grey squirrels which my grandfather would knock out of trees with a weighted stick so he could claim a bounty on the tails. I dread to think that some innocent enquirer might, one day, unleash these curated memories as if they were facts.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn? We worry about the power of AI but it seemed to me that it’s not behaving like an organised crime syndicate (at least at the information gathering level) but as a kleptomaniac or shoplifter criminally entering my mind and indiscriminately shoving everything into a bag marked swag, to be sold on in the dark web of plausible untruths.

Granny Perrin’s nest is, and always was a metaphor. My mum never for a moment thought that there was a real nest up there at the top of the tree, with an elderly lady living in it, issuing weather forecasts. It was a piece of folklore with a useful predictive truth about weather. The world of story and song is full of these instances and they can travel, even as far as a city like Bath so that I can listen out for the church bell which always brings cold winds, or the bending of the tree which tells me about atlantic weather approaching.

The great elm trees would have been used by the bodgers in the nearby woods who made the most wonderful Windsor chairs and other fancies using elm, which doesn’t split, for the seats and beech or some other locally available timber for the other parts. We would often walk through the woods to Margaret’s beer shop as our parents delicately named it, and eat crisps and drink cherryade. My grandfather was a carpenter whose family had lived in the same village since the 18th century. He made us rainbows with a stirrup pump and a bucket of water. My Granny was a cockney, brought up within earshot of the Bow Bells as an orphan. We never knew how she was brought up and cared for. Layer after layer of meaning that resonates for me, reduced to a handful of gradgrindian facts by heartless machine learning. And yet I often come across myself in some more or less caricatured form on the internet. My God I’ve lived an interesting life, I think as Madame and I lie in bed holding hands and dreaming. Our mother loved her plants and she would never visit a garden without indulging in a bit of harmless larceny; these memories gather around me like an incandescent ball of fireflies; immune to capture. Let’s not call it intelligence any more – it’s not spreadsheet knowledge it’s more of an address book for locked rooms which no AI agent will ever be able to enter. No one reading them off a screen in the future will be able fully to enter their world. All it will tell is where you might begin to look for your own story.

I’m wondering if it’s me that’s heritage!

Is it me? I wonder, as I sit here surrounded by cables and what the tech industry chooses to call “heritage” equipment. A few weeks ago I was involved in contributing to a podcast on Zoom and had a few anxious moments when I discovered that the camera on my laptop was broken and the tablet I brought in as reserve refused to play. In the end I did it with my phone and it was fine; but it left me with a gnawing sense that I should sort it out. First stop was to enquire about mending the laptop, but it turned out that it would cost £180 just to take the screen off. Meanwhile my room is filled with a collection of old and new cameras – all capable of video – indeed my friend Phil Peel has made whole films on his Panasonic GH2 in the past. The video quality would be miles better than a cheap webcam and I’ve already got a radio mic so being a thrifty kind of person I dropped into a rabbit hole of competing and conflicting standards in search of a way to join the dots and build a recycled webcam setup.

I quickly discovered that my box of carefully curated bits and bobs was full of kit that fought like rats in a sack. This was – I learned- due to problems with “handshake”. The IT malarkey is a very vocabulary extending business. I also fought my way through multitudes of standards, connectors and Papal encyclicals while I began to run up a hefty connector bill with Amazon. It would have been easier to understand if everyone else wasn’t speaking Greek while I was speaking Latin but a week’s onscreen work, with my eyes very sore from a cataract operation, produced something like the Nicene Creed which only worked then because absolutely no-one understood it and I – like a blind man given a Rubik’s Cube – fiddled about randomly changing around the plugs from my growing collection until sulk by sulk the camera talked to the laptop; the hub found the sound and by a miracle it all found its way across the wild waves to the front room where Madame was waiting patiently for my ghostly face to appear, connected to a voice. Most of the previous hour we’d just been shouting to each other across the corridor.

Thrift is hard work. Another old friend, Harry Griffiths gave a wonderfully funny off the cuff speech at his 90th birthday when he finished a long excursus on apple trees and thrift by saying that the trouble with eating up the windfalls all the time was that you never got to eat a decent apple. The fact is, I’m not that interested in the IT at all. I begrudge the amount of time I spend learning new skills and new programmes because what I really want to do is get on with writing. The thrift is an ethical stance against premature obsolescence and waste. One of the main reasons I kicked the Apple (computers) habit was because I couldn’t stand the way that a 14 year old counter assistant curled his lip at me and said I should get a newer model when all it needed was a battery.

But now I’m almost there; just one new ‘Dp’ cable away from having to unplug and replug the old HDMI lead every time the laptop shuts itself down- so last year! – and then I can carry on experimenting with adding some video to the Potwell Inn feed. The biggest obstacle is getting the technicals under my belt to the point where I don’t even think about them. I’m used to “getting the script off the page” on the radio and I’ve got years of microphone technique under my belt. I once helped out with a recording of the Bible when – for a very small fee – I played the devil; typecast as always. They told me it went down a storm in Africa where they loved my accent. I had no idea that the devil came from Gloucestershire.

My biggest worry is that my readers will hate my voice and recoil from my weathered and ancient looks and frankly wild hair and turn to more sculpted and siliconised bloggers, but I cling to Samuel Beckett’s wise words –“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. Meanwhile I need to tidy up the clutter on my desk and ring the garage yet again. The campervan, having failed its MOT, is still baffling the experts with its record breaking emissions. Meanwhile here’s a nice picture of what my phone tells me is Ceylon spinach – growing in our neighbour’s polytunnel. Oh what a tangled web ….. etc. Then I’ve added some cautionary photos of leads in boxes. It should keep you awake. It did me!!