Some of the revellers watching the draw for the wassail King and Queen in the orchard behind the pub on Saturday
I’m not sure if the bloke in the stovepipe hat above was representing the Engineering Section of the Cider Club as Brunel, but as you can see, Littleton people – and lots from elsewhere – went the extra mile on Saturday night and turned up in proper mummers’ costume and makeup. It can be extremely cold in late January but if there’s a clear sky we often enjoy a perfect moonrise over the orchard just as the volley of blank, black powder shots are fired of to scare the demons away. Sparks and flames light the sky and we all get going on the saucepans and empty barrels while cheering lustily, fuelled by a variety of ciders. Lifesaver – the original cider – comes in at a modest 4% but there’s also Lifetaker which – our son reliably told us – is nearer 10%. I used to love cider but as I’ve got older it seems to have taken against me and in any case I’m usually driving so I have a perfect excuse not to make myself ill. Someone there liked it so much they’ve even had themselves tattooed.
Of course these ancient celebrations of the New Year – Plough Monday is another example – feel a bit pagan. My attitude to them is a bit too open minded for some. I’ve always thought of paganism as a sort of “open all hours” spirituality, a bit like a left luggage office where you can look for something that’s missing even if you don’t quite know what it is. The word pagan is bandied about so sloppily, often as a religious insult, that it resists all definition. For me, the Earth and her courses could never be appropriated into any spiritual systematics because we barely understand them, and so we just need to express our gratitude and joy at these times of turning. I’m there because I used to be the Vicar, and I can be relied on to bless the trees in as amusing a manner as possible and in less than 100 words.
The funniest part of the ceremony was the point at which a slice of bread soaked in cider is hung on the branches. The Green Man attempted a sub scientific explanation which had the insects which would otherwise have munched on the shoots and buds attracted away by the smell of cider. I prefer to think that the smoke from the bonfire would have been a more efficient deterrent. Anyway, someone asked a young boy – about seven years old I should guess – if he would hang the slice of bread on the tree. He demanded with a completely straight face – “Is it gluten free?“. So bread hung up and a glass of Lifesaver poured around the roots, a poem read by the Green Man, shotguns fired, pans beaten and a blessing from me and we all followed the King and the Queen back to the marquee in her ceremonial chariot.
As we walked down the avenue marked by lanterns I fell into conversation with a farmer I’d known for thirty years and whom I’d confirmed, married and whose children I’d Christened. I may well have also Christened him since I knew his parents well. He gave up an afternoon a few years ago to show a group of us his new robotic milking parlour. I thought I’d hate it, but it was evident that the cows who got their udders cleaned and backs scratched on their way through liked it so much they would try to go back around for a second feed – prevented by the software. Anyway we talked about regenerative farming and about his small wind farm – fiercely contested at the time, and the fact that he powers the whole milking operation from solar panels and sells raw milk from a vending machine in the yard. We talked about no-till and regenerative farming and soil improvements, not least how long they take to show results, and I felt I was talking to someone we should applaud as a farmer rather than offer knee jerk antagonism; lumping all dairy farming into an undifferentiated mass of baddies.
Later we bumped into a nursery nurse who’d looked after our youngest when he was a baby and she threw her arms around him and gave him a big hug. I think he was totally taken aback at being remembered at all, and touched by how much she’d cared about him. I was able to tell him that I’d had to fetch him home from Nursery once after they’d fed him “mud” aka mushrooms!
There was an excellent folk band, joined by a ukulele group and we sang a couple of wassail songs including the Gloucestershire Wassail and then they all went off on more well known songs. During the evening we discovered that an elderly parishioner had died during the night and there was palpable sadness at the news.
I remember Margaret Thatcher claiming that there’s no such thing as community. What a deluded thing to say! She’d obviously never known what it is to experience good neighbours; a shared culture; a village; a history and the mutuality that thrives on shared experience.
Wassail, wassail all over the town! Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown; Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree; With the wassailing-bowl we’ll drink to thee!
The first verse of the Gloucestershire Wassail traditional carol sung on Epiphany Eve
Postscript
I spent most of Friday writing another long piece, but I couldn’t make it work. It just felt bad tempered, incoherent and plain wrong. I know myself well enough to be sure that I’d have kept on fiddling with it and press the publish button with the faintly guilty feeling that I’d let myself down. Anyway in a rather Jungian moment, I somehow managed to press select all and delete; throwing away hours of work. After a few fiery moments as I hunted desperately for my deleted words I realized that my inattention and a fat thumb had done unconsciously what my unconscious was demanding, and I felt completely peaceful about it. I still don’t know how I did it, but thanks anyway to my inner critic. As someone (much disputed) once wrote, you need to learn to “kill your darlings!” It’s not unusual for me to incorporate twenty or thirty edits in a piece, but I’ve never ditched the lot before. Lesson learned.
A paddle windlass on the final pound of the Kennet and Avon canal near Bath
Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day, Today we have naming of parts. Japonica Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens, And today we have naming of parts.
Henry Reed, from “Naming of Parts, 1942
Here’s the inner mindscape of a Second World War soldier sitting in a stuffy room in early summer learning how to fire a rifle, but completely absorbed in what’s going on through the window. It’s a poem that – to my schoolboy mind – completely justified my inattentiveness when it came to applied maths, and also calls to mind Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolph Eichmann’s trial as “The banality of evil.” Nowadays the slaughter is often conducted by drones, controlled from industrial units a thousand miles from their targets. But putting that baleful thought behind me for a moment – although it’s never far from my mind – today has been a rather extraordinary one.
In the real world of apple blossom and orchards and spring I’ve been asked again to bless the cider orchard in Littleton on Severn. If you read this blog regularly you’ll see how much I enjoy this annual get together of the village and the Cider Club, but attached to the invite was a flattering remark about the way I always go about it. Presumably that means using the 150 word script that I wrote years ago, in as non sectarian, non denominational; oh alright as non religious a way as I could.
The trouble is, Madame shredded the script a few weeks ago before the invite arrived, because she didn’t think I’d ever need it again and when I went to the laptop I couldn’t find it anywhere. I found the filename on my old MacBook, but the file itself was empty. Just turning the blessed machine on had been an adventure since the batteries had died years ago and in any case I’d forgotten all the passwords. It was like breaking into Fort Knox.
My adventurous migration from Apple to Chromebook and thence to a Pixelbook came as a result of a conversation with one of the geniuses at the Apple Store who held my Macbook as if it were carved from dogs’ turds and pronounced that it was far too old even to pass through the portals of the repair shop. I clutched it back and harrumphed out of the glistening palace of overpriced junk and only then wondered what to do next.
Luckily my son who’s a total techie had just been given an HP Chromebook as part of a deal when he bought the latest Pixel Phone and he passed the freebie laptop on to me, and showed me how to move all the files from Apple to Google Chrome. Like most of these procedures I only thought about all the files I’d saved onto Dropbox after I’d completely forgotten another set of passwords. Then after a year or so the HP Chromebook blacked out and we could do nothing to bring it back to life. Meanwhile I’d invested in a Pixelbook and so I just carried on. Today we were searching the data badlands for the missing script and when Madame plugged in the deceased laptop it spluttered and coughed a bit and sparked up as if nothing had happened. By this time I had two deceased laptops and one new one all working on the Potwell Inn dining table. I wonder, I wonder, I thought if one of them could be persuaded to cough up the missing Dropbox password. Such wild hopes tend to evaporate like the morning dew in the face of zealous protection of my privacy by the kind of companies that are perfectly happy to sell my details for a fee to the highest bidder.
However, after a great deal of muttering I managed to half log in with an old internet name and reset the password. The downside was that the moment I logged on I was reminded that I’d exceeded my allowance by a remarkable 2700% and would have to extend my subscription to get my stuff back. On the plus side the bank had refused to pay the subscription for a couple of years when my card was changed. So with the aid of a 30 day free trial for a service I was already subscribing to I got my stuff back – all of it including the missing script.
You will see by now that I have no techie instincts at all. My laptop is essential to me and yet I can’t remember an eight digit login let alone a line of code. My son can write lines of code and he uses an app that remembers all his passwords. I installed the app under his forceful instruction and promptly lost the password for that too. I am a hopeless case but in this instance I finished the day two laptops up and access to Dropbox restored. I felt I should take a lap of honour around the piles of books which I really prefer. Out in the hall there’s an IKEA bookshelf waiting to be assembled but I’m far too busy now, looking at all the photos I thought I’d lost forever. Happy days! – or should that be daze?
I checked on the Potwell Inn stats a couple of days ago and I found that my writing output took a real dive after August last year and has only just begun to pick up again in the last couple of weeks. I know exactly how this happened and a quick look at the diary confirmed it, because that was when I had all my heart medications changed after an echo scan, which kicked off a load of side effects that made me feel really – and I mean really under the weather, much more than the original reason for seeing the GP. I’d had what’s called Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation for years – it’s pretty common and as long as it’s managed properly it’s not especially dangerous. The Paroxysmal bit means that it doesn’t happen all the time and the GP had warned me that the usual course of the complaint means that the frequency slowly increases until the episodes pretty well join together and your heart is beating irregularly all the time – which can make you feel a bit odd; light headed and wobbly.
I’d always kidded myself that a heart rate of 190 while I was climbing, or in the gym, was a rather positive sign that I could really put my foot hard on the floor and get away with it. That’s until we watched a 24 hours in A&E episode in which a woman was taken off to hospital in an ambulance for having a heart rate of – I think -154. Cue, or should that be queue for an appointment with the GP.
Anyway, to cut a long story down a bit , it was all taken rather seriously and after some scans I was given some medication and told – for the very first time – not to overdo it. The penalty, I was told, was the high risk of a stroke or a heart attack. But hours on Google and in conversations at the gym and with a GP neighbour on the allotment who, when I asked him if I’d ever be able to stop the medication replied “only if you want to die!” ; no-one was prepared to specify what exactly overdoing it means. It all reminded me of a verse from a poem by ee cummings –
(let’s go said he not too far said she what’s too far said he where you are said she)
ee cummings – May I feel said he
I largely managed to put the whole boring diagnosis out of my mind; but to be honest, working flat out on the rowing machine – my favourite activity in the gym – now always led to one anxious eye on the heart rate monitor which often obliged me with some randomly threatening results. Then came the COVID lockdown and the gym was closed for months so I took to weights and floor exercises at home.
The GP was right of course and I finished up with constant AF and some noisy heart valves. Hence the new medication that didn’t stop the AF but slowed my pulse quite a bit, dropped my blood pressure and made me feel ill. That all started in August when the Potwell Inn work-rate fell. Our GP pharmacist was brilliant and we agreed that I’d put up with feeling absolutely rubbish and give the new medication time to bed in – which slowly made things better until we got COVID for the second time and then I really did take a dive. This new variant left me completely exhausted, often breathless, dizzy and with no appetite. “There goes Christmas”, I thought.
And then I slowly felt better. During our week in Cornwall I discovered that I could still walk up some pretty steep coastal paths without having to stop and catch my breath every 20 yards. It was all a matter of overcoming the anxiety and pacing myself. This week we reinstated the 10,000 step walk that we invented during the lockdown and it was OK. I could hardly believe, it but apart from a bit of understandable stiffness I felt back to normal. I even – and I haven’t even confessed this to Madame yet – I even thought about a gentle rowing session at the gym. After all, apart from killing myself what could go wrong? More seriously, after decades of refusing to act my age, I think I’ve cracked it. I should act my age, control the anxiety and not overdo it, after all death is God’s way of telling you to slow down, so I need to keep my feet off the throttle and not worry too much about being the oldest person in the place.
Being fit; being able to do things is a truly precious feeling and it makes me feel confident and happy. The hospital consultant cheerfully told me on my last visit that he could pass a minute soldering iron down one of my arteries and burn out some of the extra nerve endings whose random firings are the ultimate cause of all the bother; or they could still fit a pacemaker; so I’m not nearly done yet.
And has Spring sprung? and is the grass riz? As the ninth named storm crashes over us in the season since September, the plants seem determined not to let the wet winter, the frozen spring and now more torrential rain and wind get them down’ and neither shall I.
You probably need to come from the UK to know that “tough cheese” is the exact equivalent of “so what”, or “hard luck”. You probably need to come from Lancashire to know that Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese has been exonerated from any connection with an outbreak of e.coli. The national newspapers were all over the story that Kirkhams cheese was the next best thing to a trip to the Exit Clinic in Switzerland, but they seem to have maintained a Trappist silence over the results of the long investigation by the Food Standards Agency who tested sixty batches of Mrs Kirkhams Lancashire cheese since December 2023 and failed to find a single contaminated batch. Worse still; of 31 people infected since August, only eight said they had eaten Mrs Kirkhams and seven of those had eaten the cheese as part of a mixed plate of cheeses and charcuterie assembled by third party supermarkets. I’m indebted to the Lancashire Post for this information - and of course to my absurd attachment to local online newspapers, or at least those which aren’t entirely staffed by interns who write their stories using AI, yes I’m talking about you Reach!
Anyway, why should I be so exercised by the fate of a small dairy in Lancashire? I’ve never even eaten their cheese, although I’ll be off tomorrow to buy a piece out of solidarity. The thing is, I love cheese, and unpasteurised cheeses have an almost indefinable depth of flavour that none of the big pre-packed industrial ones have. The first time I tasted Westcombe Cheddar at the Saturday Farmers’ Market here in Bath, it felt as if I was revisiting my childhood. Yes it’s expensive but I’d rather eat a pound of Westcombe over a month than the same amount of Cathedral City in a day. It has a lingering fruity depth that I hadn’t tasted for decades. Since I found it I’ve eaten my way through dozens of hand made cheeses, many of them unpasteurised, and read books about them all. It’s an absorbing obsession.
So I was thinking today after I’d read the Lancashire Post article, that the world needs good questions more than ever before, and I’m indebted to Sid Harris, a wonderful teacher and witness at our wedding who would always challenge my flights of sociological imagination with the best question ever – “It’s all very interesting Dave, but where’s the evidence?” Where, indeed, was the evidence that shut Kirkham’s dairy down and probably very nearly destroyed their business. Who fed the story to the national press? and what vested interests kept it there for weeks? What deeply rooted prejudices against unpasteurised milk greased the flight to an assumption that the cheese was the problem? Let me tell you I’m much more frightened of shop assistants, deli’s pubs and cafe’s who couldn’t tell a HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points Plan) from a vague injunction to wash your hands now and again. I’ve just been prepping an Indian chicken dish, and I probably washed my hands a dozen times and sprayed the work surfaces twice while I was doing it – and that’s because I’ve had campylobacter twice from improperly barbecued chicken! Food safety matters, but in this instance a small business was jeopardised before the evidence was in. An immediate inspection and tests accompanied by checking all the documentation should have at least prompted a cautious response from the FSA before throwing them to the dogs.
We need to ask ourselves whether we value the work of these small artisanal producers to the local economy enough to support them or whether the authorities should always support the industrial food producers against the little people. If we’re at all serious about tackling the economic and environmental disasters that are racing up on us, then the emphasis has to be on local, low impact and low carbon (ie transport costs) with less intensive milk production.
In the US the FDA waged a war against unpasteurised artisan cheeses for years – it’s a story well told in Bronwen and Francis Percivals’ book -“Reinventing the Wheel” Over that past decade we’ve learned so much about the importance of microbes – bacteria and yeasts – in the human gut biome, that instead of being scared of so-called germs, we now embrace them and pay out exorbitant amounts of money to buy industrially produced supermarket supplements where our grandparents got them from fresh home cooked food, especially fermented preserved foods, like cheeses. Eventually the FDA backed down in the face of stolid legal persistence and now there’s a thriving artisanal cheese movement in the USA.
So Sid Harris’s question – “where’s the evidence David?” is as good as any GPS device for getting us safely to the place we need to be. Our whole culture has become infected with the deadly postmodern idea that we create our own truths and that evidence is the problem if it cuts across our prejudices. And so we trundle merrily along in a tumbril of our own making towards the cruel punishment that is waiting for us. There is time to change our ways; but not much of it!
It would be nice to be able to believe that the story of Bladud – the mythical king who founded Bath after noticing his rather scabby pigs liked to roll in the black mud of the heated swamp that was once all that existed of the Georgian/Roman/1960’s redevelopment horror – was so fanciful that no-one, not even a PR consultant, would ever come up with such a fanciful story again. Such people still exist in droves as hack journalists and are only too happy to use Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 11th century yarn to attract visitors/shoppers to the City. Naturally they’re not coming for the black mud any more, and leprosy has dropped off the radar for the well-to-do; but they are coming to experience the rather confusing melange of Roman Bath and Jane Austin’s Bath alongside a bit of shopping and more chain restaurants than you could shake a stick at. We don’t mention slavery except perhaps to mention the brave attempts to abolish it. Kingsmead doesn’t feature much in the story because it was heavily bombed in error by enemy pilots during the war who were using an old version of Google Maps and missed the Abbey and the Admiralty offices by a quarter of a mile. Kingsmead has always had a bit of a reputation which it clings to even after the loss of the medieval brothels, stinking dye works and unruly drinking dens. We’ve had two stabbings, and a drugs arrest since we got back from Cornwall on Monday. Bladud, just to clarify things, was not a Georgian builder and had no hand in building the rather lovely terrace that bears his name. But hey! truth is whatever you want it to be and if you’d like to believe that the Bell Inn on Walcot Street was landlorded in the sixth century BCE by King Lear (Bladud’s Son) be my guest. You’ll be working for the Conservative government in no time.
Sorry, honestly, for that little eruption of bile, but living in the gulf between what we experience every day and how the media chooses to report it is depressing and debilitating in every way. However back to ghost signs, and the one in the photo was only uncovered in July of last year, and all credit to the owners who understood that historical relics like this are a marvellous reminder of the real life of the City in the past. Actually there are two signs, and the one underneath can be dated to around 1847. You can check it out on the Akeman Press website run by Andrew Swift, the author of some of the best historical guides to Bath. We ordered one of his books online and they delivered it by hand!
These ghostly remains are a powerful reminder that we don’t live exclusively in the present, whatever the therapists may tell us; we really can be in two places, or two centuries at once, and that experience can be profoundly important. Seeing and touching the insignificant artifacts of the past stretches the imagination and informs a kind of empathy with the challenging and different cultures of the past. I was once asked if I was a member of the “Somerset Poles”. I assumed that the question referred to the direct descendants of Margaret Pole, 15th Century Countess of Salisbury, and for all I know I could be. What I didn’t realize until last year, was that there are many more people with my surname living in places like South Stoke than I’d ever known about. There are family stories about my dad going to visit to old aunts “somewhere near Cheddar” who were part of my great grandmother’s family; so yes I probably am a Somerset Pole but I harbour no delusional thoughts about living in one of those grand Georgian houses. My first thought on seeing those ghostly signs was to imagine myself driving a small cart down the street, collecting urine for the dye works. I’m really not gentleman material.
The signs also remind me that I won’t be here forever. Andrew Swift suggests that an early owner of the building would have been the surgeon and apothecary William John Church. Where is he buried? who knows? There are no surviving grateful patients or litigious failures to ask and in any case he moved on when the eye infirmary set up shop. I can close my eyes and imagine well heeled patients entering and leaving through that very door. People began coming to Bath in Georgian times because they were often sick and believed that the sulphurous waters could make them well. Later, when it became fashionable, there’s no doubt that some of the visitors could have been found in the brothels of Kingsmead and up the London Road.
Bath has an incredible abundance of ghost signs and most visitors hurry past without looking up at them but for me they’re better than all the carefully curated signage. Dog food, engine oil, eye infirmaries, dairies, cafes; in fact all the everyday stuff tells us more about Bath than the glossiest shop window. When I was a child and we caught the bus into Bristol, I was always intrigued by a sign above a fairly grubbly looking shop front in Old Market. It announced “Ace Erections” by way of a curly neon tube in red. I always thought it was a building company!
I’ve already written about our hasty decision to rent a cottage on The Lizard because we were both suffering from post COVID tristesse. We calculated – as we always do – what was the cheapest week we could get before the price doubles at Easter, and a phone call sealed the deal. After weeks and weeks of continuous rain and three weeks of COVID symptoms we were desperate to take advantage of what promised to be a dry week with occasional sunshine. Both of those qualities were abundant here but sadly we also had wickedly strong north-easterly winds which kept the temperature down to 4C but felt more like freezing. Cold enough to take your face off even with three layers of clothes, beanies and mittens. I don’t think we’ve ever known it colder here – as far South as it’s possible to be on mainland Britain. Still lovely as ever but the usually reliable signs of spring seem to have been stopped in their tracks.
My initial aim was to check out a pond. Here it is. Last year I’d come to believe that I’d failed to spot a little plant called Spring Quillwort – Isoetes echinospora – which sheds its fronds in the winter. It turned out I was wrong because if I’d taken the trouble to check I’d have seen that it’s never been recorded on the Lizard. Anyway one thing led to another and I discovered that there is another, even rarer, member of the same family which does grow here and attracts visiting botanists from all over the world. It’s an odd plant that grows in impoverished soil in temporary puddles during the winter and, in order to survive the constant drought, dies back in early summer. Our first expedition was compromised by sheer driving wind, but I managed to narrow our find down to one of two species and then decided to send a photo to the local Vice County Recorder for his opinion. He was right – I was wrong and it was Spring Squill but he’s a very encouraging kind of man and sent me a detailed map of where I could find the real deal. Short of coming and holding my hand he couldn’t have been more helpful.
So on Tuesday afternoon we set out once again, map in hand in the fierce wind to a place close to the car park to search again. They weren’t there but it’s a bit early in the year anyway. What we did notice was an enormous gorse fire running apparently out of control and very close to another potential group of plants. Cue for a strong email to the National Trust asking why on earth they were burning gorse so close to a nationally important site. To their credit the project manager emailed me back within the hour explaining what they were doing and describing “controlled burning” as one among many controls that were being trialled on the Lizard, to improve the life chances of around 20 nationally important species. “That’s great” – I thought, but the word controlled is a bit of a tricky one. You can control everything up to the point where you apply the match to the tinder but thereafter the wind will take over and from where we were standing it looked as if the flames were twenty feet into the air and travelling at speed in the direction of the footpath where the rare plants had a foothold. They wouldn’t have had the ghost of a chance of stopping it, if it got sufficiently close to the path to cause damage. Fire and flood are two of nature’s gifts that do not allow negotiation.
The project manager said that he had been present and he didn’t think it was out of control, but conceded that we might have had a better view of it. He also said that the burning had been carried out by contractors. From a contractor’s point of view a strong northeasterly, driving the fire towards the cliff would have done the job quickly and efficiently – which would have been fine if the purpose of the burning was merely to clear the ground of gorse. But the true purpose of the burn was to create a better environment for the rare plants and therefore speed and efficiency were – or should have been – subsidiary to their preservation!
My other objection would be the sheer amount of particulate (PM 2.5) matter released into the atmosphere along with Co2 and all the other noxious substances that bonfires emit, plus the release of phosphate and potash from ash into what needs to remain impoverished soil. Against that you might argue that if the contractors had waited for a southwesterly which would have taken the direction of travel of the fire away from the cliffs; Lizard village would have been inundated with choking smoke – so maybe cutting the gorse back would have been a more expensive, slower but greener alternative.
So after smoke – which we know to be a component of climate heating and lung disease – there comes ash, which is quite alkaline, quite mobile, and known to be fairly soluble in some cases; plus all of the the accumulated trace elements which – depending on the heat of the fire – can also be released. There’s an abundance of science on all this and it seems wise to err on the side of caution when it comes to these highly vulnerable sites. It’s never a good idea to let the perfect drive out the good but sometimes we need to look for a better kind of good.
Obviously, fire and overwintering insects aren’t a good mix. In a world of reliable abundance maybe the loss of a population of insects would be soon repaired. Eggs and pupae can’t get out of the way. The Project Manager wrote that expert surveys had been carried out before the policy had been adopted, but there is no denying the impact on insects and many species of bee overwintering in the earth beneath the gorse; and finally, Gorse, which flowers the year round, is a useful source of nectar at a time when there’s nothing much else around.
Now I have the greatest of respect for the National Trust and for Natural England and I’m quite sure that a good deal of discussion was expended on the variables in all this, but “The best laid plans of mice and men” …… etc are always liable to be upended by the facts on the ground, and a little humility, when the plan literally turns to dust and ashes, goes a long way. Nature conservation demands a fleet footed and occasionally improvisational approach and the problems come thick and fast when institutional inertia gets in the way. If this is an experimental project this may be a time when one part of it should be abandoned in the light of events.
First list of the year
We come down here most years for a break – usually around three weeks later than this year so we can look for spring plants.As the years go by it’s more like checking out on old friends; but there’s more than an element of looking for signs of spring – like fields of flowering daffodils near Culdrose, as they are this year. But the weeks of rain followed by this extreme cold snap has certainly held things back. I’ve come to appreciate the exuberant beauty of plants as they burst through the soil. The rosettes of Wild Radish leaves are probably as lovely as the plant gets, for instance. In particular we were looking for some small populations of Babington’s Leek that we’d recorded for the first time last year, and a wireplant that must have travelled from New Zealand via the isles of Scilly; both of which were in or near the ruined serpentine works at Poltesco. So we parked the car at Ruan Minor and set off down the steep valley, past a restored but apparently abandoned water mill and on to the ruined mill on the sea shore. What’s not to like? industrial ruins and rare plants – paradise.
So with the two boxes ticked we also looked for plants in flower and found twelve.
Celandine
Winter Heliotrope
Hogweed (unexpectedly)
Perennial Sowthistle
Dandelion
Ivy Leaved Toadflax (white form)
Primrose
Snowdrop
Violet
Red Campion
Gorse
Daisy
Admittedly we’re talking about single specimens in some cases, but that’ll do for a harbinger of better times, we need some good news. I’m not sleeping well and tormented by dreams of violence. Last night I dreamed about children in a war zone. I won’t bother you with the details. Here are some pictures of the mill and some of the plants, taken by Madame.
Postscript
The gorse burning has continued for several days, with the Fire Brigade called out at least once. Photographs on social media on Sunday showed that the plume of smoke could be seen from Penzance. It seems to me that in an age when we’re thinking twice about wood burning stoves and garden bonfires, it’s a bit rich when a state sponsored organisation (Natural England) is burning acres of gorse for any reason at all. It may be perfectly legal, but that doesn’t mean it’s sensible or ethical. One obvious possible solution is to cut the gorse back, shred it on site to reduce the volume and then compost it and/or use it for mulch. More expensive? Well who’s paying the bill for the environmental cost of the fires?
The view through the window of the marvellous cafe at Kynance Cove
Years ago we were on the Roseland peninsula, skulking along the coast path when we spotted a botanist. We knew she was a botanist because she was in the classic field botanist’s question mark pose – head bent over, walking very slowly and scanning from side to side like a faulty photocopier. “What are you looking for?” I asked. I should admit immediately that I’m quite deaf because I clearly heard her say “squirrels”. A conversation of stacking non sequiturs concerning little furry animals followed for a while when it finally dawned on me that she was looking for Spring Squills – Scilla verna – for the serious, and I was able to purge my imagination of the possibility of a colony of Red Squirrels living under the radar in Cornwall. However it was worth the embarrassment because I’d never seen a Spring Squill and then suddenly we knew where to find them. Now, of course, I wave a languid arm at them and say in my best Martin Jarvis/ Just William voice – “Oh them’s Spring Squirrels” whilst inwardly plotting terrible revenge on Violet Elizabeth Bott. If you’re interested, they grow profusely behind the coastguard lookout east of Portscatho and – what’s more – all the way around the Lizard coastline.
Anyway, the Spring Squill was the cause of even more confusion today, because we set out to find not just any old pond, but the precise pond in which I had come to believe I’d failed to identify a pretty rare plant last January. Needless to say I was wrong in every respect because once we got back with grid references and photographs and then defrosted our hands I waded through my pile of books and found that my hoped-for rarity had never been found anywhere near the Lizard but that there was another proper rarity growing down here that I also thought we had seen today.
It wasn’t the best day for a minute examination of the local flora. The gunmetal grey sky and a nominal temperature of 4C hardly describe the reality when you factor in the 20 mph east windchill. We were heads down all the way, and even with my new heavyweight oiled Welsh wool polo neck, two hats and a down jacket, we were very cold. Thank goodness for the cafe at the bottom which was open and selling tea and toasted buns.
Anyway, it turns out that Land Quillwort which does grow here is all but indistinguishable, at this time of year, from guess what? ……. Spring Squill- oh bother!! Now the Quillwort is so rare that you can’t just go uprooting bits of it, so the only way to see what it is would be to revisit in March and see what’s come up. This is how we amateurs go completely bonkers and land up with gimlet eyes and strange personal habits. I could cite the authorities I’ve consulted but this isn’t meant to be a student essay as much as a cri de coeur from a bewildered man.
But why’s this so much fun? Well you’d have to talk to a psychotherapist I’m afraid, but sitting here surrounded by photos, grid references and field guides I feel completely at home and in my happy place. No peculiar tics any more, I’ve been pretty successful at hiding them. Tomorrow there’s a possibility of snow which, in this part of Cornwall is a rarity. If I could offer just one suggestion as to why this is so rewarding, maybe it’s this. When you get to a certain age you become invisible. Even your children begin to see signs of senescence everywhere and turn away offers of advice or help, occasionally rather rudely. But then, as it happened today, emails arrive from older friends and younger people with real heft asking you to do something; a bit of proofreading maybe. Plans are laid for field trips which will go ahead because we – The Three Musketeers – will go out on a recce and we can make them happen; and you can ask questions of world class experts and get them answered and you feel useful. And if you should think that this is all nonsense then ponder this. The 202o UK and Ireland BSBI Plant Atlas is the result of as many as 170,000 volunteer days of recording. If you read anything in the newspapers that refers to plants and their current state in the midst of a climate catastrophe it will almost certainly come from this data. We oldies still have our uses!
Floodwater makes a strange and almost haunting sound; all the more frightening for being relatively quiet. This is water at its most dangerous, the point where it seems to assume a malevolent personality. The waves and pulses – yes, the river seems to pulse – whisper quietly to one another – they plan, they finger the banks as if they were looking for weaknesses; they race past me faster than a decent runner could manage . Imagine the sibilance of a flock of roosting starlings with the volume turned down; busy, organised and purposeful. The swans have decamped to a newly made lake among the houses opposite. With both towpaths flooded and impassable, we residents gather in small knots at the end of the terrace to watch, take photographs and peer upwards through the leafless trees and watch a police helicopter hovering overhead, praying that there’s no lost soul tumbling lifelessly along the scoured river bed.
It seems to have rained every day for over a month. Monsoon quantities of water soaking the ground and washing thousands of tons of impoverished soil into the river. The old floodgates have become cranky and unreliable and there’s even talk about removing them altogether because the Council have invested millions in a new flood relief scheme which works by storing the overflowing water among terraces which they hope will be filled with shoppers thronging a new retail centre in the summer. I spoke to a council worker early this morning who told me that the previous record height at the spot we were standing was 5.5m. Today it was 5.1m and rising. Maybe someone miscalculated, I wondered, with all these new build blocks of studio flats with a handsome premium for river frontage – maybe a river frontage in the midst of a climate catastrophe is like a ringside seat at an earthquake. Maybe an underground carpark below river level is tempting a providence that’s turning bad on us. Who even knows where we go from here?
This is not an act of god, this is an act of revenge for the raging stupidity of those who caused the problem. Last night on local television we learned that some SUV drivers had been driving at speed down flooded streets – because they could – creating bow waves that washed away the householders’ sandbags and caused their houses to flood. Words fail me.
I was just adding up and I’m pretty sure our first visit to the Lizard would have been in 1969 while we were at Falmouth Art School. It must have made an impression because when we moved to Bath Academy of Art in Corsham we went back for three weeks, camping in a heavy cotton tent on a farm for 50p a night with access to an outdoor toilet and a cold tap in the corner of the farm garden for washing. The farmer was an amazingly good looking young man with blond curls who was experimenting with milking three times a day. We quickly got through the small amount of money I’d earned as a temporary groundsman and I had to phone my sister for some additional funds. The journey down began with a car drive to Penryn with a friend who was visiting her brother and then after an overnight stay we caught a series of buses beginning outside the Methodist Chapel where they were singing in tongues so loudly you could hear it through the three foot granite walls. We finally arrived in Lizard hours later, just in time for a snack in the Regent Cafe on the green (still there). For some reason I’d brought my little portable Remington and a coffee percolator (I didn’t type a word the whole time we were there!), and everything we needed was packed into two rucksacks; mine was so tall I could barely lean to one side without toppling.
I was determined to walk across to Kynance Cove to camp, but I was equally determined to navigate across the most direct route rather than follow the coast path. On sober reflection and more than fifty years later I understand that every mark on an OS map has a meaning. Not least the little wavy blue lines that signify some very rough and waterlogged ground. I had no idea then what botanical treasures we were stumbling across. We finally made it across Lizard Down in the dark having scrambled down and up the precipitous sides of a valley quite unnecessarily and erected the little yellow tent on the first bit of flattish and dryish ground we could find. In the morning Madame went for a wee behind a rock, having barely slept a wink for fear of being inundated by the sea which – although it was noisy, was 100 feet below us – only to be approached by a phalanx of bemused walkers. We’d pitched the tent in the middle of the coast path. Words were spoken and we packed up and walked the coast path back to Lizard.
The three weeks were blissfully hot and we walked and sunbathed all day, discovering the small villages, eating at the cafe when we got back from our explorations and drinking at the pub in the evening. On one occasion I tried to drink every whisky on the bar while Madame had her first taste of brandy and Babycham. It didn’t end well and I banged my head on a farm shed lintel so hard that I saw stars. On other evenings we really did see stars; millions of them.
This was the holiday we discovered Cadgwith. We stopped off in Ruan Minor and found a little pop up cafe doing cream teas in the garden, and then we walked on down to the Cove and – although I couldn’t swear to it – I think we probably bought fresh crab. Cornwall had been a revelation to us; both of us born and brought up in Bristol and, for the first time, seeing Dracaenas, (which were Palm Trees as far as we were concerned), growing everywhere. The sea there, after the familiar mud soaked grey brown of the Bristol Channel, was a miraculous blue. It was there I discovered the name of the exotic looking clifftop weed called Kaffir Fig. It was there too that we saw the last few Choughs eking out a living before becoming extinct for several decades. Intensive farming and chemical cattle drenches finally did for them and almost did for the Ravens too. It was there that two intertwining threads were born in us; a passion for natural history and a passion for this extraordinary part of Cornwall.
When we go back anywhere along that coast, the first thing I do is take in a great draught of the air; of the sea, the grass, the cowpats in the fields – not the ammoniac stench of huge silos but crusting there on the grass for flies to lay eggs which hatch into maggots which in turn feed the Choughs. The second thing I do is to pause and listen to the sea, the wind and then the birds. Jackdaws, Choughs, Rooks, Crows, Magpies and even Ravens if you’re lucky – they’re all such voluble chatterboxes. The Lizard is known as a botanical hotspot which, translated, means there are so many plants I don’t recognize and can’t name, that I exist with a permanently cricked neck and spend the evenings poring over books and photos. I’m a slow learner.
Then for some reason we stopped going there. It felt overrun with tourists not like us, and the ambivalence of the Cornish towards us was occasionally hard to bear. Too many Tarquins and Cressidas; too many labradors; too many wannabe sailors and posh wetsuits; too much Guinea Fowl and too many places we could no longer afford to eat; too many times being ignored in the bar whilst the barking classes sharp elbowed their way to the front.
We eventually had three boys and for most of the time life was a struggle but we found a wonderful and cheap campsite in the extreme west of Wales with amazing beaches that you could only access on foot after a long walk; and where we could go skinny dipping if we felt like it and build driftwood bonfires on the sand. The boys were happy there and soon found friends among the AT (alternative type) campers. It was like Totnes by the sea. On one occasion one of the other parents asked us if it was really true that we cleaned our teeth with twigs – the boys had rather exaggerated our commitment to low impact living.
I was learning plants more quickly by this time – making long lists of them as we walked down the lanes, whilst barely keeping my head above water at work. There were several occasions when I drove back home – a 300 mile round trip – to take a funeral in the middle of a holiday. I always felt responsible, but we survived the worst that a few of the church congregation felt entitled to throw at us and gradually they left to attend other churches where the vicar was more malleable and would do as they were told. Pastoral care for us was a joke, because the bishops felt threatened by therapeutic groups that might reveal abuse and bullying in the Church of England.
One lovely summer we took three weeks off and went camping in West Wales and by the end I felt like a wildly excited dog, charging around the field. I think that was when I realized that some jobs will crush the life out of you if you let them. There was me preaching about life in all its fullness and slowly fading away myself. That summer I let my beard grow and when we got back one of the congregation told me I looked frightening. I felt that was a good start.
But what about Cornwall? One summer after the boys had left home and we were both working full time we’d arranged and paid for a holiday in the South of France and needed to hire a car which you can’t do without a credit card. That’s so the hire company can remove hundreds of pounds from your account without asking you, on the spurious grounds that you didn’t refill the tank until the fuel ran over your shoes. Anyway, the credit card never arrived, the holiday and our money were lost and three weeks later the bank rang to say that they’d found the card in a drawer in the office. No word of apology or any offer of compensation. Madame was devastated and I felt responsible but she immediately started searching for a new holiday. Needless to say looking for a campsite in August is tricky but she stumbled on a long established campsite in Cornwall that had just changed hands, which had led to a bit of a boycott by the longstanding patrons. So we were in, and found our Cornish heaven again. We’d had a couple of damp squibs in the intervening years. One cottage near St Ives, owned by another vicar, turned out to have walls running with damp and squatting in a sea of mud. The tenants on the farm looked terrifyingly inbred and we drove straight home again before the banjos and shotguns came out.
The new campsite on the Roseland Peninsula was everything we needed and had its own microclimate with its own flora. But working eighty hours a week precludes any serious botanising apart from a few short holidays and so we had to wait until we both retired and moved to Bath before we could settle to some serious plant hunting. Nowadays we alternate between the Lizard, Portscatho and the Llyn peninsula for longer breaks and do local field trips with the Bath Nats where there are abundantly qualified members to help us identify plants and fungi, even insects sometimes.
Cornwall is a difficult place to get your head around. I’ve often written about my attraction to post-industrial landscapes, which the county offers in abundance. There’s barely a square mile that hasn’t been dug up, turned over and mined. A century later it all looks like a film set; ferns growing tastefully from the crumbling pitheads against the pyramid backdrop of china clay spoil heaps; footpaths glistening with mica flakes; cliffs stained blue and green with copper and arsenic leaking from flooded mine adits.
And then there are the fishing villages. Hardly anyone outside the big ports like Newlyn and Penzance goes fishing any more, apart from a few small day boats after mackerel, crab and lobster to sell through the back door – but the fishing myth persists in a miasma of half remembered better days. It’s kept alive because we all need it to be kept alive. What cottage or pub connects better with the imaginary past than the one with a few coloured glass floats and a brass barometer on the wall? In the winter the pretty villages empty out and go dark. Village schools, churches and shops close every year as the locals move to damp and poorly maintained rentals inland.
But we go back like lemmings to the edge of the sea every summer because we need to feed some remote part of the soul that can’t be fed anywhere else. We take our own soul food; a few folk songs, remembered paintings, some Leach pottery maybe – because the essence of twenty first century life; the high wall that keep us chained to neoliberal stupidity is the constant erosion of historical memory. Memories of the real past, like languages don’t just wither away, they’re deliberately suppressed and the resulting holes are filled with the polystyrene foam of costume drama on TV. Cornwall is Poldark; Poldark is Cornwall. Believe what you like! Truth is so last year! A bit of wrecking or piracy or smuggling is OK, after all it’s only a film!
I suppose for a botanist, even a very amateur one like me, it would be simpler to ignore all that stuff and just enjoy the plant life. But there is a live interface between, for instance, unemployment and a dirty industry like lithium mining. Polluted land might provide a niche interest for people like me, but it’s polluted all the same. In West Penwith there’s a battle raging between Natural England and some of the local farmers. There are about 3000 hectares of moor and downland that constitute one of the largest semi natural sites in the country. We’ve walked the footpaths there for years. But nutrient enrichment and changed land use towards intensive farming is slowly destroying the habitat. There’s more heat than light in the debate because the farmers will be compensated for any effect on their income, but there’s no doubt that the way of life they’ve become accustomed to for – say – fifty years, will have to change. That’s a toughie because a fifth generation farmer didn’t sign up to become a nature warden and very properly wants a bit more flesh on the bones of how it’s all going to work. The problem is, organic change is very slow and incremental but the environmental crisis is more akin to a tsunami. There’s no time for a generational change and some farmers there find it threatening and oppressive to be told their traditional way of life is less important than a tiny plant or a spider.
The Cornish, like most threatened communities, have become defensive and suspicious of the government. The fishing industry has been hammered by brexit whilst simultaneously overfishing because you have to make hay while the sun’s shining. Lack of housing is a huge source of anger – it goes on. Tourism is a constant irritant; there are too many buy to lets and airBnb’s and, just as with the tin mining, much of the money is exported to the wealthier parts of the UK.
And yet ……. and yet, when the beach side building that houses fishing gear in Cadgwith came onto the market, threatening the livelihood of the last few fishing boats, the local community launched an appeal which was supported by people all over the country and the building was saved.
When we are there my greatest joy is to stand at the kitchen door of our rented National Trust cottage – in truth an otherwise derelict cattle shed – and absorb the smell and plangent sound of the sea against the rocks below. I don’t need to own it, or control it in any way. The thought of it just being there is a sustaining one when the going gets tough in Bath. A week is all it takes to fill the tank, and we’ll come home with dozens of photographs and maybe identify some never seen before (by us) plants, oh and we’ll eat fresh fish from the fishmonger in Porthleven, drink wine, sleep like innocents and feel the life running through our veins.
If there is a solution to the conundrum to the disconnect between real Cornwall and the competing fantasy versions, it will surely include tourists like us; but let’s make it sustainable tourism, buying locally to support small businesses, parking thoughtfully without blocking the lanes and respecting those who live there the year round. Let’s support any initiatives to bring sustainable non-polluting green jobs to the county and behave like ethical grownups!
