Being in a relationship (with nature)

A garden scene featuring a glass greenhouse and a plastic polytunnel, surrounded by various plants and greenery. Two large water containers are visible, along with wooden garden beds and a signpost.

In the recent BBC TV adaptation of the novel by Janice Hadlow, in which she constructs a plausible sequel to Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, the dreadful clergyman Mr Collins is found reading Aristotle; searching – as he says – for the way to be happy. Happiness is a fairly inadequate way of describing the best life as envisaged by Aristotle. In his view, happiness is not much more than a side effect; but the real deal, and the driving force towards it is eudaimonia usually translated as flourishing. We flourish when we practice the virtues – which can be expressed in a number of ways but to take just the foundational ones; courage, temperance, justice and prudence are some of the most important from a list that can be expanded to twelve or even more. If Mr Collins owned up to Aristotle that he was hoping to be happy as a result of reading a book, the philosopher might have made him write out 100 times – I must not be greedy, ambitious, hypocritical, grasping and in particular I must not render widows and their daughters homeless and dependent on the generosity of their rich relatives or hoping to be funded by marrying wealthy bachelors.

The virtues are not abstract bits of head knowledge but more akin to habits which – if we cultivate them – become embedded in our behaviour. We’re more likely to do the right thing without having to think it through each time. This all sounds a bit too intellectual but you’ll notice that all the virtues are relational; they’re to do with the way we relate to other people in our everyday actions. Kindness, loving, respectfulness, honesty, self control and courage, are not so much concerned with holding certain beliefs in our minds as with acting them out in the market-place of our lives.

Labore est orare

Sorry about the Latin, but it’s important. I first came across this saying – it means to work is to pray – many years ago in the context of Benedictine monasteries where, I discovered that in some of them the words labore est orare are inscribed above the chapel door as the monks leave and the opposite saying orare est labore –to pray is to work is written above the door as the monks enter. St Benedict wrote his rule of life centuries before the Greek text of Aristotle were translated but in a kind of wonderful evolutionary convergence, the Greek texts were translated by Benedictine monks centuries later and they became hugely influential largely through the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. I’ve only been to one Benedictine monastery and I very much regret not visiting the chapel to see if this suggestion is true. Anyway, it stuck in my mind as an almost perfect expression of the gardening life. Today I was on my hands and knees weeding (I’d also knackered my back digging out volunteer potatoes on one of the overwintered plots) – and I experience a prolonged contemplative moment when I lost myself even amid the intense noise of the building site across the road. I watched a holly blue butterfly, a small white, a brimstone and a red admiral all about their business in the warm sun. Yesterday I found a marbled white trapped in a greenhouse, and today small whites were about. An impudent jackdaw flew on and off the allotment stealing beaks full of sheep fleece from within five feet of us. The earth smelt beautiful as it always does around Easter time.

Black and white image of a rustic house with a garden, featuring wooden supports in the foreground and a stone wall in the background.
Our first real garden in Pickwick.
A quaint garden surrounding a cottage, featuring lush green plants, a small table and chairs, and a rustic wooden fence.
Here’s the same garden 55 years later

This connection with the natural world is a perfect example of the relational nature of the virtues. The reason we feel so content, so joyful when we’re gardening is because there is a kind of conversation going on between us and the soil and the plants. The seasons and the weather are all part of the great conversation that constitutes a season.

Our relationship with the earth is a lifelong conversation not a million miles from the great conversation of a long marriage. Kindness, loving, respectfulness, honesty, self control and courage are as applicable to the foundation and evolution of a garden, or a farm, or a nature reserve and SSSI as they are to human interpersonal relations. There’s always something to learn in a garden; a time to yield and a time to push forward. A time to bend every sinew and a time to rest.

And so it is, that labore est orare – to work is to pray – becomes the form of prayerful practice that leads to true, deep, inexpressible possibly even sacramental happiness rooted in commitment to one another -gardener and farmer with soil, human partnerships in all kinds of love. And the greatest thing about it is that it requires no dogma, no theology and no dressing up.

A grassy garden area featuring sparse vegetation, a small shed in the background, and a few scattered tools and materials. A section of black tarpaulin is laid on the ground with twigs and dried plants on top.
The allotment on the day we took it over, ten years ago

Winter’s last gasp – hopefully

A panoramic view of snow-capped mountains in the distance, surrounded by rolling green hills and a sparse forest of trees. The sky is partly cloudy.
Pen y Fan dusted with snow, seen across the Usk valley from above Talgarth

A couple of days ago a minor skirmish broke out on social media regarding the change of name from Brecon Beacons to Bannau Brycheiniog – in the wake of the announcement by the National Park Authority that it’s rapidly going broke. Coincidentally I was continuing to read Jan Morris’ excellent book “The Matter of Wales” which exposes the part played in the suppression of the Welsh language by the English educator Matthew Arnold. This latest outbreak of social media bile and stupidity was led by a mob of English speakers, one of whom bravely named the mountain at the top of this piece “Penny Fan”. The troubles of the National Park and – for all I know – the entire nation could, according to the wisdom of the internet, be laid at the door of the Welsh Language. All those expensive road signs. They’d be stuffing themselves with silver spoons and turtle soup if they’d given up Welsh and spoken the same as what we do and joined our brilliantly successful politics and neoliberal economic witchcraft. Ah well! Whatever that means the answer is probably Port Talbot.

Anyway, back home from our little adventure in the hills above Talgarth we discovered that the builders had not finished dealing with our black mould and can’t come back to complete until the Easter holidays are over, so we spent a couple of days cleaning up the cement dust and turned to the allotment which is the only bit of our lives in which we have complete agency. Wales is a beautiful and paradoxical country and I often wonder why I feel such a strong affinity – except today I was reading about the 1930’s and I suddenly remembered my dad’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the miners strikes, the railway strikes and the suffering of the people in the valley towns. I was raised on tales of riots, police brutality and solidarity. My dad and my grandfather were ardent socialists and I suppose I absorbed their principles from my earliest childhood. As I grew up and saw how people actually behave I was, and I remain, shocked.

But I want to celebrate for a moment one of the great things about The Bannau Brycheiniog and you may be surprised to learn that I’m talking about the ironmonger’s shops. They’ve all but disappeared in much of the UK but Webbs in Crickhowell and Jones in Hay on Wye are survivors in the glum world of out-of-town superstores. We used to have several of them in Bath – one of them, clinging to a famous name in the area – called Avery and Bowlers – has just closed down. Bowlers fixtures and fittings can still be seen in the Museum of Work here in Bath and there’s a gas engine there that I helped photograph in 1971 when their factory was abandoned. The other I remember was a firm called Hine and Collinson on the London road whose employees, in their brown warehouse coats, could find almost anything you could name on one or another of its five floors. I once bought a new double duplex glass chimney for my granny’s paraffin lamp which I inherited by default because no-one else wanted it.

Webbs in Crickhowell is such a great experience it should be on the tourist map. We never go in there without coming out with a new teapot or a curious kind of egg cup. Anything from a bottle opener to a chair can be found there. Jones Home Hardware in Hay on Wye performs a similar service to its customers, scattered across the neighbouring countryside, who might be in search of a crowbar, a chainsaw or a broomhandle. It carries a similarly eclectic stock of very useful things across several shop fronts and a broad public alleyway horizontally arranged on Castle Street.

Exterior view of Jones Home Hardware shop, featuring a traditional facade, advertising for Honda lawn and garden equipment, and various gardening tools displayed outside.

Of course the butchers and bakers who are usually mentioned in connection with high streets are also important; but there’s nothing quite like an ironmonger’s shop to exemplify the way people live around here. Hay on Wye is mainly known for tourism and as a centre for second hand books and can often feel like a gated community of retired art teachers, but the thursday market is still a lively affair with more (and much more attractive) bakers selling every kind of sourdough bread, kimchi and mead – and where the trinkets are decidedly upmarket. The ironmongers aren’t after the tourist pound – they still serve the rural hinterland; the bit we enjoy for free – and hints at another deeper Wales just under the surface. As for bookshops, Richard Booth’s bookshop is still the first and the one I probably enjoy the best. On Thursday I came out with about the tenth rewrite of a wartime book then called “Plants poisonous to livestock” which Madame gave me as a gift in the 1970s; brown; thin; foxed and printed on cheapest paper. My new version is bigger and better in every way and it also gives plentiful tips for disposing of humans you’ve fallen out with.

Meanwhile, as I always feared, the newly published flora of Brecknockshire (that’s Breconshire in old money) arrived too late to take with us to Talgarth and as soon as I took off the wrapper it fell open on the page describing Herb Paris. I know and I’ve seen the plant in Velvet Bottom, on the Mendips but that was in the days before I knew anything about proper recording and I didn’t take a photo I could refer back to for verification. In spite of a number of return visits to the spot I’ve never been able to record it. So yesterday I discovered that it’s found in the same nature reserve in Talgarth – Pwll y wrach – that we visited. I excuse my failure to see it because it’s the wrong month for flowering, and the lower paths, closest to the water, were closed due to the danger of falling ash trees. No such excuse for another long-sought plant; Spring Sandwort which grows on the hills just above where we were staying. We’ll just have to go back and take the new flora with us. The book took almost 60 years of intense research to write, and sadly the author, Mike Porter, died a year before it was published.

The weather, during our visit, was pretty wintry and we had rain, sleet and even snow during our four days. Thinking back over our sighting of the old Central Wales Hospital, the discreetly renamed asylum, I woke up this morning after a sleep troubled by dreams with a phrase from a Robert Burns poem turning slowly in my mind:

Man's inhumanity to man 
Makes countless thousands mourn!

Why do I love Wales so much? There’s a sentence in the Jan Morris book that comes close to expressing it. I often used the contrast between the favela and the steppes when I was in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It seemed to express the polarities of mood that I live with. Jan Morris, in trying to express the Welsh personality draws on another source from the Welsh language. The Welsh, she says, hover between hiraeth and hwyl – between the sad longing for a lost home, and the exhilaration of a full sail at sea. Either way round, it sounds a lot more creative than a diagnosis for some kind of disorder of the mind!

A ‘crown of thorns’ moment in the Bannau Brycheiniog

A view through thorny branches and barbed wire, looking out onto green fields and distant buildings across the valley.

We’re here in Wales again; this time we’re 1000 feet up a hill and just on the edge of the treeline. We’re here because the builders have moved into our flat, finally to install some humidistat extractor fans and get the black mould permanently off the walls. It’s been a ten year battle with the landlords and we’re so relieved they’ve finally listened to us.

This time we’re above the small town of Talgarth beneath Waun Fach and very close to the Cambrian Way walk. It’s cold; extremely windy and we may even get some snow up here later on. There’s a small stream running very close which becomes larger as it tumbles down the hill and finally when it reaches the town, feeds a working water mill as the River Ennig. Its route takes it down a steep sided cwm where there is a partially open nature reserve called Pwll-y-wrach “witches pool” which – legend has it – was used for ducking suspected witches in a heads I win, tails you lose form of rough justice.

A view of a rocky landscape with flowing water and moss-covered stones, surrounded by trees and greenery.

Rough justice is a bit of a theme for this corner of God’s own country. We arrived too early to check in so we parked up and visited the nature reserve of the same name which is partly closed to visitors due to the epidemic of Ash dieback. The combination of emergency felling and wind damage give the valley a strangely gloomy air notwithstanding the emerging spring wildflowers which seem not to mind. There were even a couple of species of Bumble Bee mooching about to provide a soundtrack. The wildlife managers of the site have taken a decision not to remove all the ash trees, but just the dangerous ones and to leave a good deal of the brash in situ for the woodland residents.

I’ll come back to the more cheerful spring flowers, but when we first booked here and got the address “Hospital Road” I guessed instantly that we would be near the old Talgarth asylum which has fallen into dereliction and now is locked away from visitors apart from urban explorers who are prepared to take the (considerable) risks. We were walking down the road back to the car when we spotted it through the hedge below us and it truly is a melancholic ruin. I once worked as an art therapist in a similar hospital in Bristol which has now closed and is largely demolished. It was a dark place of historic injustice and suffering in spite of its origins as a safe and productive, self-sufficient colony. Overcrowding, underfunding and sheer lack of vision condemned thousands of guiltless men and women; many of the men shell-shocked after the cruelties of war and the women labelled as moral defectives because they had become pregnant. All crowded together with other violent and sometimes psychotic residents and nurses who acted more like prison warders, and who would punish those who got out of line with injections of paraldehyde which was so noxious it had to be administered with a steel and glass syringe because it ate through plastic as it ate through the skin of the unfortunates who called it “pollyeye”. Something went terribly wrong with the vision and a miasma of suffering still hangs over the buildings in which it was administered. Thank goodness those days are largely gone. A classic example (think of the present government) of what happens when policies fail but no-one has any inclination or clue how to mend the damage.

Anyway – enough – I wanted to write about spring as she’s manifesting herself here up in the hills where it’s colder and later. We only had a short walk, but we spotted primroses, common dog-violets and early dog-violets, lords and ladies, dandelions, wood anemones, barren strawberries, lesser celandines and soft shield ferns. The woodland floor had the early leaves of herb robert and wild garlic and there were large numbers of acorns on the ground in the process of germinating and opening their seed leaves like scarlet cloak – very pretty. I didn’t have time to make a detailed list, but there are some photos below.

Not a bee then? a Furry Dronefly!

Four consecutive days of wall-to-wall sunshine should have reminded me that the spring equinox – not the boring Met Office one but the proper mobile one – isn’t always on the same day. So we missed it entirely while we worked on the allotment. When I was a schoolboy I was invariably referred to by one teacher as “rod pole or perch” – an ancient system of length measurement which lingered on the back of our exercise books along with acres, chains and gills. Equinox is at least based on an observable measure – the day nearest to offering an equality of time between night and day. Easter, of course does its thing based on a 13 month moon cycle defying all logic and creating great hazard for those who always plant their potatoes on Good Friday. I love it: the sheer irrationality of it all defying the tidiers-up makes me smile.

Anyway we were so busy on the allotment that the equinox passed us by and bang on time I’m driven back to the same old question – why is nature so good for us that it distracts us even from marking the (old) beginning of spring? After the winter we’ve had, I can’t begin to say how lovely it’s been to feel the sun on our backs at last. Coming back home every day with our muscles aching and fingers creaking you might think a bit counterintuitive to make a fuss about it. But the allotment offers one small part of our lives over which we have almost complete agency. In an existence filled with expectations from every quarter; bills; health problems and you name it – the allotment is an oasis in which we get to choose what to do without having to bend to the cold winds of authority. There are rules of course but they’re mostly common sense and neighbourliness. Nobody pays any attention to the daft rules about the permitted colour of sheds and the precise percentage of flowers to veg that must be adhered to, and as any Welsh poet will say; rules are the primrose path to creativity.

Anyway, the business of agency is a key concept for achieving eudaimonia – true, deep, happiness. We spent a lot of time this week planning how to move the compost bins and turn them into raised beds, how to move two water butts from one optimal position to another even optimal-er one. We ordered our seeds, decided our priorities and prepared beds for sowing and planting out in the next few weeks. Each day we felt that little bit stronger and we thanked the weather gods for their generosity as we always must.

Being perpetually hard-up we are free from fantasising about machinery and fencing to keep out badgers and people. Every bit of mulch has to be planned and transported down the bumpy path and, expecting the weather to be unexpected much of the time, we develop a kind of radical patience thanking nature for her unexpectedly generous lessons. The bee at the top for instance is not a bee at all but a fly; a dronefly- in fact a Furry Dronefly. I’m not an entomologist but a handy app on my phone helps me to sound cleverer than I really am. “Shame on you” cry the gathered deacons with their withered knowledge and multiple imagination-sucking certainties. But I’ve got other things, better things to do – like learning Welsh and cooking lovely meals and so I’m content to make an assisted guess now and again.

The light at the end of the tunnel.

A stone staircase leading down through an arched entrance, with a lantern visible at the bottom and greenery lining the path.
The passageway and steps leading steeply down from the Paragon to Walcot Street

We were lured out by the sunshine this morning and went for a decent circular walk taking in some shopping, a stop off at Toppings bookshop to book tickets for John Wright’s launch for his new book”Grasslands” in May, and then a bit of wall propping overlooking the weir feeling warm for the first time in months. Then another loop up the greatly diminished Walcot street to the top and back along through the Paragon, Milsom Street and home.

Don’t try this at home (or ever)
A lush patch of green foliage with bright yellow flowers growing alongside a stone wall.

Going down the steps to Walcot, if you looked closely across the road,you’d have noticed a rather early flowering Greater Celandine in a large pot outside a charity shop. I took this photo ages ago and didn’t think to photograph today’s specimen until it was too late. The thing is, I’d only today been looking today at an entry in a book on Welsh herbal remedies. The section on Celandine comes from a 15th Century herbal translated from the Welsh by John Pughe in the mid 18th century and taken from the tradition of the Physicians of Myddfai – so going back a bit.

A good eye salve. Take vinegar, white wine, the juice of Celandine, and Plantain. Mix them together in a pan and let them stand there 3 days and 3 nights, take it hence, keep it in a box and anoint thine eye therewith.

Here’s the thing, though. Among many other suggested uses, the bright yellow juice of the Greater Celandine is caustic enough to burn off warts and piles. There’s no way on earth anyone could put such a decoction in their eyes without damaging themselves unless there’s something in the recipe or the procedure that the canny doctors failed to share. I’ve got both glaucoma and cataracts (not that they trouble me much and they’re being well looked after by the NHS) but I’m sure that if Andy the optometrist were to lean across me with a mixture of Greater Celandine juice, vinegar and Plantain, and then try to drop it into my eyes I’d be out of the door pretty fast.

That’s the trouble with the reading that I’m doing about Wales and her history. Someone recently alluded to a kind of Cambrian fog that gathers over the culture of the country and leads unprepared travellers (like me) astray if we fail to inspect the teeth of the Bard to be sure that it’s gold and not mercury amalgam glittering between the lines.

We learned the difference between exegesis and eisegesis at theological college. Exegesis means trying to unpick what the original author was trying to say. Doing it properly can feel like unpacking a bottomless suitcase full of ancient garments and figuring out how they were worn. The opposite term, eisegesis, is much beloved by the evangelicals and involves trying to stuff a pair of your own theological pants into the suitcase after discovering that there’s nothing in there that quite matches your prejudices and so you have to chuck out the original contents and their bizarre notions, so you can get more of your ideas in and declare that you have the true meaning of the original.

There’s a phrase that comes from one of the great 20th century scholars of ancient literature who said – if that was what it meant then to the writer, what should it mean to us today? – which is to say that ancient literature and history need to be read with your brain in gear and not uncritically regurgitated as if it had nothing to do with the culture in which it was created.

The events of history are mundane and slippery; evanescent. It takes a poet to land a grappling hook on them and haul them in. It takes a poet to write about them fruitfully and yet another to read them well in vastly different circumstances and even those readings are as evanescent and slippery as the original events. There is never anything but provisional in the pursuit of history, and yet it’s the cultural air we breathe and so we must take it seriously.

I’ve been reading Jan Morris’ book “The Matter of Wales” and the third chapter deals with religious faith in Wales. I found it quite troubling because as she enumerated the waves of religion from the Celtic through Roman Catholicism, post Reformation Anglicanism (both enforced on the Welsh) and then waves of Calvinism, Methodism, Moravianism leading to the 20th century collapse of faith – I realized that in my own way I’d been touched by all of them and even experienced many of them myself. I went through what’s falsely described as Primitive Methodism in Sunday school (the Prims); conventional low Church of England, fiery atheism, Wesleyan Methodism, Evangelical low churches, Anglo Catholicism and theological college on the cusp of the Charismatic revolution. Whatever the light was at the end of the tunnel, they all seemed to swerve away from it when it got too challenging. Pretty well all of them operated a chaplaincy to the status quo. Nowadays if I was forced to put a label on my beliefs it would fall somewhere in the dim space between Celtic Christianity and Taoism but it would be better to evoke the old spiritual doctrine of reserve and apply it to the world in general and the understanding of past cultures in particular. The light at the end of the tunnel for me is the incredible freedom of feeling I don’t have to defend any orthodoxy at all.

The three graces – possibly

And the star prize goes to –

Well of course it goes to the Morel which suddenly appeared at the back of the polytunnel. A quick tour around the internet – (my books only say what it is) – suggests that firstly it’s fiendishly difficult to grow artificially and secondly that it may be in a mycorrhizal relationship with the row of apples growing a few feet away. I just thought that it was a wonderful and serendipitous gift from the wild gods which will be joining some shop-bought distant cousins in a risotto tomorrow. It’s one of the rare spring fruiting fungi and I’ve never seen it before. The other spring fungus is the St George’s mushroom which we’ve gathered and eaten in the past but these days we’ve given up foraging them . In fact a couple of friends have developed strong allergies to them after many years.

An allotment update

Elsewhere on the allotment, spring seems to have sprung after a couple of false starts. While I was feeding the polytunnel strawberries which are already in flower, Madame picked an armful of rhubarb. The autumn raspberries that we planted last year are poking through their sheeps wool and wood chip mulch, and the top fruit trees are all very close to flowering – which may be a problem because we had our second real frost of the winter last night – so we hope they keep their flowers cosy and wrapped for a while yet. The soft fruit too is growing away fast, and my rescued blackberry cultivar is at last showing signs of outgrowing its infant problems. The Tayberry is, as always, growling with excitement.

A polycarbonate greenhouse and a polytunnel in a garden, surrounded by young trees and vegetable plants on a bed of wood chips.

After the recent wet weather the pond is full to the brim once more and the other surprise today was the amount of flower on the clematis which has sulked for five years and seems to have got its roots down at last. Notwithstanding the label it looks very like a Clematis montana to us.

The Equinox is next week and then the builders are coming to connect the kitchen and bathroom vents to the outside world – that’s after ten years of black mould and constant letters. I was beginning to wonder if we’d live to see the day!

A close-up view of a trellis covered with clusters of pale pink and white flowers, surrounded by green foliage, set against a backdrop of a vegetable garden and garden shed.
The Clematis doing its thing at last!

Learning by immersion

A panoramic view of a tranquil lake surrounded by rolling green hills and scattered trees under a blue sky with fluffy clouds.

Madame and I were sitting in bed today, reading peacefully – she on her tablet and I was immersed in a book by Jan Morris called “The Matter of Wales” the title being a playful use of language in order to indicate the substance, the deep matter of the country. The book was mentioned in Carwyn Graves book “Tir” which I’ve now finished and recommend without reservation as a gentle pushback against some of the more extreme (destructive) advocates of rewilding. For Carwyn Graves the Welsh landscape embodies the history of Wales for better and for worse. History is written in the soil, the rocks and fields; the livestock, the farmers and their lives but especially in their stories and poetry. It’s a beautiful book, and completely by accident I met one of his interviewees in the pub in Bwlch but we only talked about our experiences as writers for the then local Bristol newspapers. As soon as I saw his name in the book I recognised my lost opportunity to talk to an award winning maker of perry – pear cider.

The two books – Graves and Morris take interestingly different approaches to their subject. The landscape for Carwyn Graves is perfused with recollections of the old ways; a form of living history and its lessons for us in the present day. For Jan Morris the landscape is a living being; writhing, roiling, joyful and melancholy by turns. The history here is inscribed in lives lived in the landscape. She’s a magnificent writer on Wales.

So there we were (I mean Madame and me!) in bed reading and we have rules. Silences are only broken by mutual consent – “can I just play this ?….. ” Today she played an old recording of Pentangle – the brilliant Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny Thompson and Jacqui McShee with others – and in something of a Damascus moment I realized I’d left out music, and in what Flann O’Brien would have called a “Keats and Chapman” moment (without the terrible pun at the end); the whole landscape opened in front of me as if I were stood on a mountain top seeing the plains below receding in aerial perspective until the faint blue landscape reached the sea. Of course, you idiot! I thought -it’s language, history, literature, poetry, art, religion, drama and music. It’s the art of the kitchen table and the blackened pot suspended by its crân dân (fire crane) over a crackling fire, the blacksmith, the spinner and weaver, the shepherd, the singer and the traditional doctor, the understanding of plants, the wood carver and the brewer. One of the most inspiring paragraphs in Carwyn James ‘ book is his explanation of the way that in Welsh the word for culture isn’t the cocked finger, class ridden culture from across the Severn – but it also embodies all of the undertakings of ordinary people to advance the experience of being human. So emboldened by this thought I made some coffee, went into my room and guided by some odd instinct searched out a small book about Welsh folk medicine. I’ve known about the Physicians of Myddfai for many years in a more or less superficial way but I had no idea where Myddfai actually is. I had a strong idea of what I was intending to write but (as ever) no idea of how it would shape up so (also) as ever I hunted for a suitable photograph and came up with one I took of one of the three reservoirs which accompany the A470 across the Bannau Brycheiniog passing Pen y Fan. We stopped in a layby there for a brew-up and were joined by a couple of bikers from Merthyr Tydfil on their way to a campsite near Brecon. It seemed to me at the time that this was a near perfect view, but as I looked for the village of Myddfai on the OS map today, thinking to include the physicians who came from that area, I realised that the village was no more than a couple of valleys to the west of where I took the photo, and furthermore the foundational story/myth of these physicians involved a meeting between a farmer and a beautiful water goddess near a lake just like the one in the photograph.

My question would be – is it even possible to understand a landscape or a word in isolation from its whole culture. Many years ago we travelled by ferry and bus down to a small hamlet in southern Ireland for a holiday with friends. One of the friends owned a holiday cottage down there and knew some of the local people. One night we were introduced to two brothers who lived alone in a fairly squalid cottage just up the lane. The two brothers shared a bottle of Guinness with us and clearly thought we were pretty wealthy on account of one of us wearing a new pair of Docs. I had taken a small tape recorder with me and they told stories and sang songs to us provided we returned the offer with songs of our own. Our companions suffered a sudden attack of elective mutism and I sang a supporters song from Bristol Rovers which seemed to please them no end. Just to give a flavour of their lives, they told us that they had advertised in the Cork Examiner for a wife that they would share between them. The ad also generously noted that a pre-existing child would not be an obstacle! Anyway, it became very clear that their stories and songs of the Famine, and of the IRA battles of the past – not to mention a disastrous storm from some time in the distant past – all existed in their minds as if in the present. They sang and spoke of them as if they were still actually happening. It was a powerful example of what I’ve been thinking about in relation to Wales.

The photograph at the top was taken the day after my retirement ten years ago. I remember the journey because our youngest phoned just after the photo was taken with some kind of crisis and we had to abandon our plans and drive back to Bristol where we were still living. The photo and the memory belong together and can’t be separated.

So here I am ten years on, firmly resolved finally to speak and read Welsh. But the conglomeration of these thoughts has led me to the inevitable conclusion that this project goes much further than learning a bit of grammar and some words. The project is a kind of total immersion into the language; the broad culture, history and all the rest, in order that – finally again – I can see the Welsh plants in their broadest meanings, and I can see Welsh food and poetry, history and song as the Hegarty brothers saw their corner of southern Ireland – as essential to their humanity – daft and cruel as that might have seemed at the time. This is what I mean by using the phrase “learning by immersion” because it’s the absolute prerequisite for deep connection with any place in the world.

I’ve done a bit with the words already and I’m pleased to be able to write and say “good morning dragon” in Welsh, although I doubt if there will be any opportunities to use it, and so I’ve switched over to a different but well-connected course which is filling me equally with terror and hope. I can already say most of “I would like to learn to speak Welsh” without having to take a lie down in the middle. Madame has banned me from doing any practice in her presence. Oh and I’ve bought some – well quite a lot of – books. Learning by immersion, you see.

An open grassy field with a row of trees, possibly apple trees, under a cloudy sky, surrounded by rolling hills in the background.
One of the Marcher Network orchards near Cwmdu

By the rivers of Babylon. I need a word and only Welsh will do

The first basin on the K & A drained for maintenance today to the bewilderment of a heron.

Looking for a photo to kick this post off I did a search and was astounded at the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken in Welsh landscapes over the years but this one fell into my lap, walking along the Kennet and Avon canal in central Bath. There’s a bigger frame of reference than English can express and it coalesces around a wonderful Welsh idea; the concept of “hiraeth”. I hesitate to call it a word because its reach extends far beyond its seven letters.

Derived from hir (long) and aeth (grief/sorrow), it combines nostalgia with a sense of grief or longing and it is considered a cornerstone of Welsh identity, reflecting a longing for lost traditions, language, or landscape.  It refers to a deep, often melancholy longing for a home or time that cannot be revisited. (Google Gemini search)

I must add at the outset that I have a very limited knowledge of the Welsh language, but I learned to pronounce Welsh place-names when I was helping to run some worker-writer’s workshops in the valley towns several decades ago. Neither Ian, my co-worker or I had a car and so we did all our travelling by train and bus and to avoid entertaining the other passengers I managed to learn how to learn to pronounce Welsh place-names properly. When confronted with a destination like Ystradgynlais it paid dividends to know how to pronounce it – even if the rest of the conversation was in English. I was once even congratulated on my pronunciation by a Welsh speaking farmers wife on Lleyn and I long for the day when I’ll be brave enough to wish the shopkeeper good morning in Welsh somewhere in North Wales without the paralysing fear of being replied to in the same language. My old Greek tutor Gerry Angel always said there were only two languages in the world worth learning – Greek and Welsh – and I’ve never had enough time to learn Welsh until (perhaps) now. I eventually passed the (New Testament) Greek exam.

A language is the matrix in which the culture of a country and its people is contained, and it follows that there are certain ideas, emotions and concepts that can’t be translated except by severing them from their context, history and memory. It also follows that there are things that can be said in Welsh that can’t be said in English. Learning Welsh, it seems to me, would entail embedding myself in the whole history and culture of the land rather than mastering the superficial meaning of even a few thousand words.

I’m familiar with this in my own experience because my native English tongue is from Gloucestershire where – as a child – we still used “thee, you and thou” – a habit that the teachers did their best to beat out of us. Anyway, they’re a most useful set of words because they convey degrees of familiarity Like the French vou and tu leaving “you” with an association of hostility and suspicion. When I first went to work as a labourer in a steel erecting firm, I was always (young, dumb and hairy) addressed as “you”. We also had a version of what the linguists call a soft mutation which is very common in Welsh. For us, the tram roads carrying coal from Coalpit Heath were always known as “dram roads”. If you were encouraging someone from the sidelines it would be “go ‘ee’ – a shortened form of “thee”. You don’t learn any of these informal grammar rules through books, you learn them from use. I’ve told this story before, but I buy all our rough sawn wood for the allotment from a timberyard near where I was born. Just talking to the counter staff there is to be transported back to my own history and sense of place, so – going back to the beginning of that long excursus, “hiraeth” is the perfect word to describe that sense of loss. The thousands of acres of farmland I walked over and played on as a child are all built over. My childhood territory is dissected by a ring road and a motorway and the brickworks and pitheads have all, bar a few crumbling walls, disappeared along with out unique dialect and the last few miners have died. The abundant methodist chapels are gone or converted into fashionable homes for incomers. The railway lines have become cyclepaths – a muggers’ paradise; predators on unwary cyclists and walkers. The Pines Express no longer thunders through the triangular junction. There’s no way back. Without land, language, culture or memories we are adrift without even our own word to describe the melancholy of it.

I’ve just started reading a marvellous book by Carwyn Graves (grovelling apologies for getting both his name and gender wrong yesterday) – entitled “Tir” – the Welsh word embodying the associated meanings of land types within Wales. I’ve got both of his previous two books, “Welsh Food Stories” and “Apples of Wales” and they both approach their subjects through the prism of Welsh history and culture. “Tir” casts a ray of light on all sorts of puzzling phenomena around landscapes – for instance – why are so many Welsh farmers deeply suspicious of the idea of rewilding? The answer is compelling and fascinating and would serve admirably as a push-back against rewilding as an abandonment of thousands of years of farming history. I’ve still got some way to go before finishing reading about all seven types of landscape – each expressed in a different word. It’s a marvellous book and I can’t recommend it too highly. It’s sent me back to the maps and dictionaries I’ve bought over the years but never fully understood and it’s also sent me back to seriously considering learning the language.

After ten years of complaining to our landlord about damp and black mould in our concrete building they’ve finally agreed to start doing the remedial work; installing ventilation extractor fans and mould proofing the walls as well as making good the botched plastering in a couple of rooms. The work is going to take a week so we’re moving out and we’ve rented a cottage high up in the Bannau Brycheiniog near the top of the next valley along from the photo. It looks like absolute paradise – the long road up leads past an abandoned asylum and a nature reserve and sits below the highest peak in the Eastern range. We’ve walked it before and it’s not in the least pretty – a big bog with a stone in the middle – but there’s a walk leading down from it to the main road that’s absolutely breathtaking. I’ve already got my plant lists ready and organised thanks to Notebook LM which happily did the work of processing a heap of data. When in despair, make a list, learn a language, read a book. It works for me!

What’s the word for the way I feel? Is there any way to do ctrl-alt-delete on the rich and powerful ?

This was one of those pieces that changes between the conception and the final result; largely because it’s so boring writing about the shitty state we’re all in, because we’re all in it so get over yourself!! So I set out in search of a word to describe my mental state because none of the usual ones fit. Just now I checked an online thesaurus and found around fifty possible words for being fed-up and, surprisingly only ten for whatever it is that’s the opposite. So in the normal state of being human is it really true that we need five times more words to express unhappiness than we do to communicate sheer joy? Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina “All happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. So clearly we actually need all those misery words for personal use even if we disregard the pathological criminality of so many of our politicians.

On the other hand, as a writer, I’m familiar with the challenge of coming up with just the right word to suit the situation and so, after a big think, I came up with one word from the much smaller happiness camp – that word is euphoria – and from there it was a short leap to its opposite – dysphoria. When in doubt go for the Greek and switch the prefixes. For me the word dysphoria reaches into parts that other words can’t reach and manages to incorporate such diverse and miserable coagulants as Thames Water, the British Labour party leadership, Donald Trump, and our neighbour who uses a fraudulent disabled parking badge – into the same enormous crock of shite that invades our daytime thoughts and disturbs our sleep.

But what’s the cure for this – well it sounds like “turn away Whittington, it’s not worth it”. And so we did turn away; cancelled the newspapers, shunned the mainstream media; devoted ourselves to the pursuit of euphoria and three days later we’re back in the Bannau Brycheiniog for a brief campervan-testing excursion – and it works! – the campervan at any rate. The media fasting works too – surprisingly well. The sun shone today and we stood on our long walk and simply listened to the birds – although, just to add a touch of reality to the arcadian dream we were on the Monmouth and Brecon canal which is closed at just the point where Ospreys are expected to nest again this year. You might have thought this was a way of minimising disturbance to the birds, but no; it’s down to a dispute between the Canal and River Trust in Wales (Glandwr Cymru) – a charity – and Welsh Water an allegedly non profit organisation which pushed up its charges to an eye watering £100,o00 per week during the drought for providing water to the canal from the river Usk. Just as a matter of interest, Welsh Water has been fined £40 million for its management failures around pollution and recently appointed to its Board the ex Chief Executive of the Environment Agency to which supervised and failed to control the enshittification of Thames Water et al. Just the man to get a regulatory grip on Welsh Water you might think.

So aside from these invasive and dysphoric thoughts and in the absence of much botanical interest apart from Lesser Celandines in profusion we walked on in pursuit of a bottle of milk and listened as woodpeckers drummed in the trees, Buzzards circled overhead and Robins, Blue Tits, Song Thrushes and a dozen other species strutted their stuff in the trees in the hope of attracting a mate. It was absolutely blissful to walk, stop and listen with occasional glimpses of Hay Bluff through the trees where a great deal of brash clearing has gone on. I saw my first ever Kingfisher here and have never forgotten the double-take of seeing and hardly believing its coat of many colours. I would not swap my battered dysphoria for all the bitcoin in the world.

Lost and alone in old town Malaga, and a horse ate my phone

Anxiety can be an awful burden, but when Madame suggested that we might clear off to old town Malaga for three weeks next February I saw the beauty of the idea at once. Our February break in Cornwall this year was completely overshadowed by rain and storms and although we summoned up the good old blitz spirit like proper Brits; even we were unconvinced by our stoicism. So yes – we both thought – renew the passports (we haven’t been to Europe in a decade since a 2000 mile adventure – crossing the Pyrenees in our tiny car three times). Never mind the health insurance says Madame; we’ll get an apartment with a kitchen in the centre of old Town then we won’t have to take a car, and (all in one breath) we can shop at the market, cook our own food and catch trains and buses and ……

Well yes, we’ve been there a few times and it’s lovely and also T shirt warm in February half-term week and we can eat lots of tapas. Last time we went, we read a glowing review for a tiny tapas bar and went to take a look during the day. As it happened, the owner was just sweeping outside and Madame accosted him and asked (rather firmly) if a space could be found for us that night. The owner caved in without a fight, and that evening we passed a long and hostile queue and settled down for some of the best tapas we’d ever eaten. I got talking to one of the locals and he said “he only let you in because you’re English!”

We found an equally good restaurant in Old Town who were offering a taster menu of local delicacies – about ten courses. I should have known better than to order two of them, but I’m a sucker. I was only thrown by the ninth course which appeared to be a pair of gigantic bull’s testicles but which were actually stuffed squid. Anyway sadly – if you’re off in that direction any time soon. (there’s a photo of the place at the top here) – a quick internet search suggests that it’s probably under new management twelve years on, so you’d need to make sure it’s still offering the amazing and totally retro service. But thanks, Hugh Whatley for a brilliant memory.

We happened to be in Malaga on Valentine’s Day that time and we treated ourselves to a meal in the rooftop restaurant at the AC Hotel where the waiter took a shine to us and insisted on treating us to two disabling large brandies on the house. That same week, we were in our room when we heard a strange noise and we raced down to the waterfront where watched and listened to a large marching band processing in a very slow march, while rehearsing for the Ash Wednesday parade. It was almost overwhelmingly emotional even to a case-hardened old pro like me to be in the midst of a performance of such ancient Christian street theatre.

Anyway, all that plus roasted almonds in the street and the quite wonderful Alcazaba Islamic palace and fortress, made Madame’s suggestion a definite yes. Except, that is, until I had the dream last night when my enthusiasm shriveled and puckered like a birthday balloon and I woke as a definite maybe.

We were there together in a market and then suddenly we weren’t together any more. Madame had disappeared on one of her customary missions without mentioning where she was going. I’m very used to it but in an English supermarket she’s easier to find. In the dream it wasn’t easy at all, and as I penetrated further and further into the market it seemed the the stalls were less and less crowded and I could see more of the building, even in the increasing darkness. It closely resembled an Escher painting but although I had my phone in my hand, for some unaccountable reason I decided not to photograph the complex of interwoven brick arches. Before long it was black and I was becoming increasingly anxious without Madame and frankly lost. Then I spotted a crack of light and a door and I left the mysterious market and entered another village market complete with flower stalls. Desperate to contact Madame I grabbed my phone just as I met a rather nice horse. I stroked his nose and without hesitation the horse swallowed my phone. I was aghast; lost in an unknown village without a phone or any clue as to how to get back to where we started. I recall waiting and mercifully the horse vomited up my phone, or rather only half of it, which was the point at which I woke up. For reasons I can’t be bothered to explain I need to take one of my several medications at 4.00am. I’ve got used to it but it does mess up some good dreams.

In my eyes that was the kind of premonitory dream I might have shared with my therapist Robin back in the day, but I knew him well enough to know he’d only throw it back at me and say “What do you think it means?” Well I think it means that we’re just like everyone else. Life is ephemeral and vulnerable and can’t be saved for later like a pension scheme; and what better way of rounding off our lives together than having fun doing what we love while we can still do it.

Today we passed a photo booth where you can get passport photos for a fiver and we both paused but said nothing. I think we’ll be back – however it was a black horse. I hope it got indigestion!