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.
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!
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.
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 du 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”. 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!
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.
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!
Unexpected visitor – a moorhen presumably prospecting the pond!
Apologies if you’ve already read a previous version of this post which I put up in error – a fat thumb exercise – before it was ready to go.
We’ve been running the trailcam every night and it’s true to say that our most frequent passerby has been a very fat rat. A couple of weeks ago we filmed a fox with another corpulent rodent in its mouth so whatever else the rats are on the allotments, they’re well fed. So I just thought I’d post an update on the night shift since Christmas. Number one is obviously rats with at least two adult individuals and one possible young one but it’s difficult to be sure with a fairly low-res image. Number two is – or rather are – a couple of foxes who hunt almost every night. The badger is a much less frequent visitor in spite of the fact that there’s a huge live set at the top of the plots. It seems that they haven’t enjoyed the terrible weather and stayed indoors; but we had a good clip on the 17th Feb where it looked as if he/she was digging a latrine but got spooked by something and scuttled away. There are two regular cat visitors and quite a few field mice. They are all mostly active between 10.00pm and 6.00am but in the summer we often see foxes at dusk. Surprisingly, we often record a robin singing away at 2.00 am. and last night a moorhen passed by – caught by its call – rather drawing attention to itself I thought.
As for daytimes we see squirrels but other mammals are conspicuously absent although we know there are visits from deer who seem to like runner beans . Birds on the other hand are regular visitors. I’ve already mentioned robins, but we see magpies, rooks and jays poking around in the wood chip. Thrushes and blackbirds enjoy searching the wooden edges of the beds for slug eggs. We once heard a goldcrest in a nearby tree and of course the pigeons are ubiquitous. We see buzzards high overhead often being mobbed by the corvids but we don’t often see red kite although we know they’re around.
There are Peregrines nesting barely 1/2 mile away on St John’s church spire, and we’ve watched a sparrowhawk hunting down a pigeon outside the front door of our flat. That’s apart from the mixture of gulls (lesser black backed, herring and black headed) cormorants, herons, kingfishers, long tailed tits near Sainsbury’s, swifts, swallows and house martins then otters, and now beaver(s) in the river. For a city centre area we seem to have some extraordinarily rich wildlife. On Tuesday we went down to the riverside path to take a look at the conservation work and there was a sign on the railings advertising the presence of Daubenton’s bats. We’ve seen and heard bats flying outside in the summer but lacked the kit to find out what species they are. We once had a magical hour watching Daubenton’s flying over Stourhead lake in the summer twilight. Perhaps we’ll try to borrow a bat detector this summer and give them a name. The moth trap battery is charged and ready to go as soon as the weather improves and I’ll carry on recording the plants so with a bit of luck we’ll be carrying out a very slow bio-blitz of the riverside area (which includes the allotments).
Every time we go on to the riverside walk we are passed by sweaty runners and cyclists who race past us missing all of the interesting wildlife. We, on the other hand celebrate the slow and the almost stationary life of the city. Being pretty old is an excellent excuse for us to explore the natural riches of urban life.
These lead mining rakes could go back to Roman times
Yesterday we drove back from Cornwall. It’s just over 200 miles to the most southerly point of the UK and with the help of a great deal of EU money it’s either a motorway or improved dual carriageway almost all the way down to Penzance. Even with the B road connections at both ends of the journey we can still do the trip – which used to be something of an adventure – in not much over four hours. I’m not a great fan of long journeys on motorways. They seem to lack any sense of where you actually are and for all their rapidity you can still sit in a traffic jam for half an hour while a couple of blokes dig out a flooded drain, negating any time saving. Anyway what’s so important about speed? To me, the feeling of boarding a plane in cold and rain and leaving three hours later it in fierce sunshine and blistering heat is a bit deranged. I once helped an old friend to move some beehives on to the heather on Exmoor and as we drove back we got stuck behind a tractor. “Oh good” he said, “I love it when we have to slow down”.
Anyway, as we came into Somerset yesterday the satnav chuntered away about delays on the M5 (there are always delays on the M5) and suggested an alternative route. I’ve never done it before but yesterday I thought – let’s give it a go and see what happens. So we followed the instructions and minutes later we entered the real world after three hours of tooth grinding boredom. The new route took us across the top of the Somerset levels by Brent Knoll which I’d never seen so close before, and onwards, passing a view of Cheddar Gorge which showed it off to perfection and then to the north of Blackdown passing Rickford Rising where the rain that falls on Blackdown emerges after travelling through the limestone rocks. Past the bottom of Burrington Combe, and into the villages of Blagdon, Compton Martin and West Harptree before crossing the reservoir and into Bishop Sutton. If we had any sadness at leaving Cornwall, this was a serendipitous reminder that many of our happiest memories are vested in the Mendip Hills.
I fell in love with the Mendips when I was seventeen and was introduced to caving by being taken down Swildon’s Hole. It was an awesome experience and emerging cold and wet after hours of scrambling through the cave the first breaths of Mendip air were always sweet. Madame never took to it and so my underground adventures were curtailed, but before we got together I would go up to Blackdown with my closest friend Eddie and explore the easy caves with – occasionally – reckless abandon. Our biggest problem was getting someone with an interest in getting cold wet and muddy who also had a car and was prepared to take us. It was rather like the inevitable compromises that aspiring bands have to make in seeking a half-decent bass player. Luckily, Madame liked walking up there and once we’d got an old Morris 1000 pickup she grew to enjoy hunting for plants and fungi; so we’ve thrived on Mendip air for many years.
I love Mendip, I love Cornwall, in fact I love almost anywhere with a complicated and even ancient industrial history that’s been overgrown by time. Although there’s almost no trace of it now, I was born on the edge of the Bristol coalfield. There was an elderly retired miner just up the street and I can remember passing the open cast mine at Harry Stoke when it was still open. Eddie and I used to play around the capped pithead of Parkfield colliery near Pucklechurch and the local hospital was named after Handel Cossham an unusually kindly mine owner, lay preacher and benefactor so, I suppose that laid the foundation for my inner landscape. My interest in plants that can survive in post industrial landscapes was born, like the passion for the old dramways (notice the soft mutation you linguists!) – in childhood. The moment I find one of these places I feel at home – whether here in Bath, or on Mendip or in Cornwall – I know where I am. Perhaps that’s why I love South Wales and its people.
I don’t know if all this explains how the Mendip Hills captured me, but the fascination wasn’t something I picked up late in life; it was there from the earliest days and I only had to stumble into it, almost by accident, to find myself there; to feel integrated (if that makes any sense at all). So here are some photos of the Mendips, of Velvet Bottom (who could resist that name?), Longwood valley, Black rock quarry, of high Mendip and Priddy above Swildon’s Hole across to Blackdown and Crook’s Peak which you’ll recognise as you blast down the M5 south of Bristol. Trust me – the walk up there beats arriving anywhere ten minutes quicker.
We both love this place – any time outside the holidays, when it gets impossibly crowded. After the weather we’ve been having there wasn’t much chance of seeing anyone beyond a few walkers but for once, apart from one brief heavy shower the sun even came out, the café was open and everyone was very happy. There were no more than a dozen or so cars in the car park, and it was blowing a hoolie as we set out, knowing that once we dropped into the valley we’d be a bit sheltered.
As we were packing the rucksack I thought I’d give myself a rest from plant hunting. Neither of us had slept well, in my case because I’d had an unexpected phone call from a very old friend with whom I thought I’d lost touch and heard some unexpected news about three others who’d died recently. I didn’t sleep beyond 3.00am as thoughts of mortality circled around my mind. So we travelled light even though I knew that the likelihood was that we’d find some rare plants, because the Lizard is an absolute hotspot, and true to form we found some lovely plants including two national rarities and two more flowering exceptionally early. Here are the rare ones – I won’t say exactly where they are growing because they could so easily disappear from too much contact with boots. I don’t know if there’s any research on these particular plants, but certainly orchids plus many other species, growing wild, absolutely depend on mycorrhizal relationships with fungi and if they’re dug up by hunters they’ll just die without the extensive fungal network that keeps them alive. That’s quite apart from a potential fine of up to £20,000 pounds because this is a site of national importance. The Lizard is an enormous lump of serpentine rock, which is rich in magnesium and poor in calcium. The soil lacks nitrogen and is very thin in places so without help from the fungi, the plants would starve to death. Anyway here are the rare two – there are others but they haven’t flowered yet so left to right – Cornish Heath and Land Quillwort which is tiny and I’ve been looking for it down here for maybe 4 years!
The best way of finding these plants as always, is to join a natural history society and get someone to show you. The Quillwort is almost identical to several other common plants that also grow in the area and as a relative beginner I’ve spent many hours trying to learn about them. Anyway, it was almost just as much fun to spot a couple of relatively common plants – Three-cornered Garlic and Kidney Vetch in flower rather early. It’s always difficult to blame global heating, but even after the wet winter we’ve suffered, there are a few more early risers each year
There were Dandelions, Daisies, Gorse and Hairy bittercress also in flower. All the other locals are there in leaf, and we spotted Sea Beet, Buck’s-horn Plantain, Sea Plantain, Thrift and Wild Madder amid the heather and plentiful blackthorn. Here are some of them:
So yes it was a lovely walk, and we sat on a bench outside the cafe where, nearly 60 years ago we’d emptied our pockets to see if we had enough money for a shared cucumber sandwich. We spent the first night of our first ever camping trip together that year with our tent pitched up on the headland. It’s a very special place which – just look at the photos – has remained pretty much unspoiled – helped by the long walk from the car park and the steep footpath you have to take.
But as well as the sunshine, the massive waves crashing on the rocks and rebounding with a wild roar; as well as the fine mist of sea spray that fell on us like a veil from the wavetops and rocks; as well as the glimpses of deep green water through the curling white horses; we heard first and then watched two Choughs playing in the wind above the steep sided valley. That and the hot chocolate so sweet it almost burnt our throats helped down with a toasted tea bun. It’s the very essence of being in nature
Another wet day in Cornwall – in Camborne they’ve exceeded the biblical flood by exceeding 40 consecutive days of rain. It hasn’t been a huge problem for us down at the southernmost tip except for the lanes – there’s only one really main road and the rest are pretty much lanes anyway and they are running with water; some right across and others at both edges but all the puddles are sheltering murderous suspension wrecking potholes. If anyone’s got a spare billion pounds we could do with some of it down here.
Anyway, the upshot of the long days confined to our rented cottage on the top of a cliff is that Madame has been doing a lot of internet surfing, and today she typed in my name into Gemini and discovered that I am the landlord of a pub in Helston whose wife was once a police dog-handler but who has sadly died. In fact, according to the infallible AI, several pubs in the neighbourhood are claiming that I am their landlord – which prompted me to ask her whether it would be OK to pop down to the Five Pilchards to see my virtual wife. Madame was not amused. Much as I love Google Gemini, it makes more false connections than a village gossip, and bigamy is still a crime.
Sadly spring has not sprung nearly as much as we’d hoped so neither the plant hunting nor the moth trapping have taken up much of our time and among other things – like writing this blog – we’ve been binge watching the old DVD’s we brought down. John Schlesinger’s “Cold Comfort Farm” is one of the funniest films ever, and Ian McKellen’s sermon to the Quivering Brethren as Amos Starkadder is an act of sheer joy. I’ve even (naughtily) started sermons myself once or twice with the words “ye’re all damned”; not forgetting to grip the edge of the pulpit and stare at the congregation with sheer malevolence for fifteen seconds. But we also watched Alec Guinness’s superb performance as George Smiley in John Le Carré’s Karla trilogy. The two BBC series miss out the middle book. It was a treat, and an acting seminar, to watch Alec Guinness playing such a morally complex character. The very last words that Smiley speaks as Karla is led away, when someone says “George you’ve won” and he replies “I suppose I have” made me wish I could hug him. It was so brilliantly done; the way he managed to express the sadness and loss of winning his epic battle.
All that ambiguity sent me straight back to yesterday’s post with the thought that I’d missed an important aspect of flourishing even though I did say that it’s by no means a primrose path. When, back in the day, I talked to parents about christening, I would often find that they had an odd idea that we believed that babies are born bad and needed to be made good by baptism. Something about washing away sins had taken root in the collective understanding. Frankly I think that’s a horrible idea, but even horrible ideas deserve a bit of thought. I talked yesterday about cultivating virtuous habits – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage; but I didn’t offer any idea of what the starting point might be. The idea that we’re born bad and need to be made good which I described as horrible would be one place (but totally wrong I think). On the other hand I’d find it difficult to say that we’re born perfect at the top of a greasy pole of corruption because that’s equally far fetched and nasty. So what about a working definition of what we might call the human condition which pitches us somewhere near the middle point that Aristotle was so keen for us to maintain. Then we say that we can move up or down the scale by way of good or bad habits.
Each of the four or perhaps fifteen virtues which can, in combination lead us towards flourishing and fulfilment have their counterparts which can lead us in the opposite direction; unhappiness and suffering. As an example I could mention affairs. We’re all much of a muchness in the sexual attraction stakes; many of us have primary commitments but that doesn’t stop us from meeting others that we find attractive. In a very long career of helping people through crises of their own making, one factor comes to the surface almost every time. We rarely get ourselves into trouble in one giant act of folly. We do it step by tiny step and then one day it’s too late. The same goes for any kind of addiction; food, alcohol, drugs, erotic fantasies, fraud, thieving, field botany or hoarding rubbish. Thankfully I’m not a counsellor so you needn’t worry that I’m about to offer advice but I’ll just quote a line from an ee cummings poem –
where’s too far said he
where you are said she
Notice also that I haven’t mentioned any divine punishments or rewards. That’s because I don’t believe in them. None of the purported torments of hell can measure up to the guilt and shame brought upon us by our own perversity, although there are many occasions when I wish that Danté’s circles of hell which included special places for bishops, princes, corrupt politicians and not forgetting people who didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Occasionally I really wish that could be true. But there are always some wicked people who seem to get away with it. On the other hand I’ve sat with some horrible people who – as they lay dying – seemed to be suffering terrible agonies of remorse. Too late!
Conversely I think that the idea we should punish ourselves and live shadow lives in order to achieve the extremely notional rewards of heaven is also wicked. The way we live our lives can’t or shouldn’t be reduced to the spreadsheets and calculus of rulebooks. Is there anything wrong with muddling along and trying very hard to learn from your mistakes?
Looking out to sea in a gale from Kynance Cove café towards Lizard point. Hot chocolate – heaven; rocks – hell.
I’ve worked in a number of places where making some kind of a judgement about people was necessary. Working in a prison, for instance, I don’t think I ever met someone who was fully guilty of the crime they’d been sentenced for. Even those who shared their crimes with me would almost always fail to mention the worst bits. As school governors we got so used to inflated references that we rarely took them into account. On one occasion a reference had been forged by a family member who was a headteacher. When writing references there was an accepted code that meant any reference that failed to recommend the applicant “without reservation” would almost always be spiked. Once, even on an appointment committee, we only discovered later that a teacher we took on a five star reference added at the last minute was inserted into the shortlist by his brother in law who used his muscle as an HMI. Perfect humans always turn out to be ‘human humans’. It was an arduous task to sort the sheep from the goats and we didn’t always get it right. Most of us hardly know the answer to whether we’re sheep or goats either, and so the business of writing a CV or a job application; training to be a lawyer or standing for parliament becomes a tremendous ethical struggle. Of course the really bad ones just lie about it and often rise to the top very quickly.
When my Dad died I didn’t feel able to take his funeral service. I never had any doubt that he loved me and that I loved him, albeit in our own fashion; but our relationship was quite challenging. He came back from war service badly physically and psychologically damaged, his mother had died when he was very young, his father was absent from his life for his early years – away fighting in Afghanistan (does it ever end?) So he suffered from agoraphobia, often drank too much and lived on valium for years. My mum became his unhappy carer. I was a very difficult and challenging adolescent and so it was all very reactive and neither of us was any good at it.
Anyway we eventually patched things up, largely through our shared interest in politics but when he died – the day after he asked me to shave him for the first and only time – (which became a sacramental memory) – I decided to let someone else take the service. But having heard hundreds of dishonest and misleading funeral addresses I wrote a couple of A4 sheets telling the real story, assuming that he would use it as a crib sheet and embed it into his address. He didn’t. He just read it out! and afterwards our oldest son said “That was the darkest sermon I’ve ever heard”.
Steering a middle course between reckless honesty and downright misrepresentation is one of the basic habits that characterise the virtues I wrote about yesterday – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage. Truth telling without spite (Justice) is one of the leading virtues – so Aristotle taught – to achieve eudaimonia, flourishing. Thirty years in Parish ministry taught me that there were many things you should say in a funeral address and many that you should never – ever – mention. On one occasion I took a service for a notorious adulterer, whose son, during his address, brought the house down by saying that his dad was a great comfort to the ladies of the village. Piloting a course between the utterly bland and the offensive truth is a skill that not everyone learns. I became an authority on tasteless best-man speeches and woefully incompetent attempts at funeral addresses as well as attempts to deceive me. I developed a nose for fibs. The churchyard was full of saints and the prison was full of innocent men.
So how on earth can we be expected to elect virtuous politicians in a society that’s wedded to dishonesty and even applauds when they appear to get results? Or perhaps to add some nuance to the question – is it even important to elect virtuous politicians? and further to that question how is it that we have fallen into the habit of electing quite so many crooks and hopeless incompetents? Is it because we’ve convinced ourselves that they’re better at getting things done because they make difficult problems look easy by not overthinking. Aristotle had something to say about that too. For him the highest virtue of all was widom; sophia; contemplation. So however decisive and quick to act a politician aspires to be, if they’ve got a mind like a collapsed souffle they’ll be no good. But mostly the old adage that if it looks like a turd and smells like a turd it’s probably a turd, applies in spades to those seeking positions of power. Sheer cleverness isn’t enough. Prudence, justice, temperance and courage are an interwoven set of human dispositions that are not the same as stature or hair colour or whether you drive a Lamborghini. They’re learned habits that, with practice, infuse our lives and help us to flourish – and a flourishing human is easy to spot in the flesh; harder to expose when all we’ve got to go on is a social media profile; but equally you can’t describe yourself as virtuous if a five minute search on the same social media will contradict that claim with solid evidence that you’ve been downright wicked, thoughtless. mendacious and cruel. “Useful” doesn’t count among the virtues.
As we go through the polytunnel and tend our tomato plants in the summer, we can decide, with a high level of confidence, which plants are flourishing and which are not. Any farmer worth their salt will be able to run their hands along a sheep’s back and know if they’re good. So why is it that we’re so rubbish at detecting the same things in humans? Or am I just a hopeless romantic??
A little bit of greenback on these tomatoes – usually down to irregular watering.
