That’s very unfair to the plantlife of Bath – after all I’ve recorded 32 flowering plants so far – but at home you sometimes have to search hard at this time of the year; the needles are all in their haystacks. I’m not quite sure where it happened, but one minute Madame was noticing that the trees on the side of the motorway were barely in leaf and then, somewhere beyond Dartmoor and Bodmin moor the roadside was white with Blackthorn flowers. A kind of bliss settled over us as we left the boredom of the A30 and drilled down through the alphabet past Truro until we reached Helston, took the Lizard road and the narrow lanes where even passing a lone bicycle takes an age. The final stretch of the journey was what we come here for every year. Botanising and driving even a small car at the same time is a dangerous occupation – as Madame pointed out whilst I did an alarming bit of careening at ten miles an hour past the bridal lace of flowers on the verge.
Where else but here would you see Alexanders, Cow Parsley, Hogweed and Three-cornered garlic jostling with each under a snowfall of Blackthorn like brushed up sixth formers in a school prom? I slowed down to a crawl, opened the window and breathed in the air. Back again like a bad penny with sixty years of memories to share with Madame after we first came here to see the Art School and our first glimpse of the real sea after the brown waters of the Bristol Channel; and the first Dracaenas which we thought were palm trees; and we were on fire – apart from the fact that the landlady at the B&B refused to believe we were married (we were absurdly young) and put us into separate rooms. Bloody Methodists!
And so we’re here again with my pile of books and these days a laptop and mobile router and more unnecessary kit than you could shake a stick at. Slept like a log (do logs actually sleep, I wonder?) and we’re booked in at the pub for a Mothering Sunday lunch. Walking is going to be a bit limited this time but Madame is having a knee replacement in a couple of weeks and she’ll soon be skipping like a young Gazelle. The sun is shining and looks set to carry on doing its spring thing – so what’s not to like?
Two figures from the tympanum at the abbey in Conques, above the river Lot
Sorry – this one’s a bit heavy, but it’s been burning away at me for many years and it needed to be written.
This is probably a sideways compliment to the Buddhist saying that if you meet the Buddha on the road you should kill him, but sadly, the Christian churches capitulated long ago to the temptations of systematic theology and mansplaining exactly what God was supposed to do to maintain their (his?) contract of employment. As for me and my heretical disposition, I stay committed to the idea that the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao. I remember asking the librarian one day in the library at theological college where I’d find the works of Thomas Aquinas. She looked heavenwards towards the mezzanine and waved a languid arm around the lines of shelves. Being an evangelical college, the lines of books were untroubled by readers.
I’ve absolutely no desire to write at any length about the rather bracing day that left me standing under a bridge in Hay on Wye watching the flooding river and knowing that in a kind of reverse baptism it wasn’t my sins that had been washed away but my beliefs. All I felt was a kind of relief that at last things were clear; along with an aching sense of the loneliness of a life without the distractions and consolations of what we used to call “stamp and circumponce“. I could abandon the comfort of the old dictum ex opere operato that says as long as you get the ritual and the words right it doesn’t matter how mendacious, greedy, ambitious, stupid or corrupt you are; the sacrament is still valid. That was the bishops’ favourite defence in the promotional chess game.
When I was a curate I stood in occasionally as a chaplain at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. I was called on one day to perform an emergency baptism on a severely burned child who was not going to survive. When I got there I discovered that the child was so swathed in bandages there was nowhere it was safe to baptise conventionally, so I improvised with a couple of drops of water and a smear of oil on the bandages. The memory still haunts me. My boss; who was a stickler for the correct procedures – criticised me in front of the whole chapter at our next meeting and announced that the child had died unbaptised. Forty years later I cannot even begin to fathom the cruelty of valuing the blather of ritual over compassion for a child and his grieving parents. Things never really got better.
I treasure a talk I once attended, given by a very ordinary (that’s a compliment by the way) – man called Ian. He was neither wealthy nor clever and he’d saved up for ages to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Galilee. He told us how, on a blisteringly hot day he’d queued in the sun to visit the empty tomb in Jerusalem and when he eventually got to the front he noticed a sign that read (in several languages) “He is not here, He is risen”. In a completely artless way he described the sense of disappointment that swept over him as he realized that, in an experience he still hadn’t grasped huge depth of, he’d found exactly what he’d come for. Faith can only begin where belief lies dead on the floor
I’m sorry about the quality of that picture but in this instance it really was a snapshot from my phone – in spite of the fact that I was carrying a far more respectable Olympus. I was just feeling a bit lazy and pissed off because I had been struggling with the menus on the GPS unit and consequently feeling a bit technophobic. Yesterday was the day I was intending to give a first run to a new workflow plan, but even on the simplest and cheapest Etrex I could buy I was still getting banjaxed by the multiple choices I needed to go through to find a simple grid reference and speeding up my plant recording had failed its first test.
So to begin at the beginning, the weather forecast was perfect, it was the first day of astronomical spring – (less tidy but more meaningful than the meteorological version which favours tidiness over aeons of history) – and Madame suggested we should go for a walk on Mendip. The campervan trip we’d planned for a 2 day visit to Priddy was cancelled because the news from the garage was much worse than we feared and the engine is going to need a complete rebuild including valve replacements and resurfacing of the cylinder head. Everything you could fear from a cam belt failure was actually caused by getting the old one replaced before disaster could happen. Incompetence, neglectfulness or the failure of brand new components will probably all figure if there is ever a full accounting, and the only consolation is that the garage has accepted full responsibility and will carry out the repairs under warranty.
So we took the car up to Priddy and parked at the end of the old drove that leads down to Priddy Pool. I’ve spent weeks prepping and planning the new plant recording strategy and so I was eager to give it a dry run early in spring before the first flush of wildflowers really begins. This is probably going to be deadly dull to all but a handful of gimlet eyed enthusiasts so I’ll keep it short. The plan is to get a full record of each new find on the spot. Photo, followed by initial ID using Flora Incognita or one of the other AI apps (if I didn’t know it already), and then a full and reliable grid reference using the Etrex handheld and backup photos for later then, finally, all that gathered information typed into the phone above the EXIF data for the pictures. This should be a bombproof workflow that speeds up the whole process both in the field and back at home. After a frustrating rehearsal I’d say it will need a whole lot of practice before I’m fluent enough to speed up.
Anyway I landed up taking just one photograph using the new method and it’s a narrow Buckler-fern, Dryopteris carthusiana; very common around the Mendips (and everywhere else) and you could find it in Nine Barrows Lane Priddy at national grid ref ST 53469 51927 which is accurate to about three feet either way. This is not an earth shattering find of course but I double and triple checked all the components and the most gratifying thing is that the grid reference is really spot on. The deceptive offerings of the mobile phone look impressive but over the past seven months of data building I’ve discovered they’re anything but accurate. One record of a similar fern made about half a mile away had it growing in a car park in Wells!
Enough! My next quarry is a similar looking fern called a Borrer’s male fern which apart from its name would appear equally dull to the neurotypical. But coincidence had it that Madame was doing a bit of background Googling while I was chatting about a botanist called Borrer about whom I know absolutely nothing. This is how she defends herself against my more obsessive traits. Much to our joy we discovered that William Borrer FRS – ( Henfield, Sussex, 13 June 1781 – 10 January 1862) was not only one of the leading botanical lights of the eighteenth century but – wait for it – he lived in a house called Potwell . This, obviously, is a sign!
I wouldn’t bother going to Priddy just to look at a fern you could probably see a mile from almost anywhere in Britain, but Priddy is a very beautiful village with an extremely decent pub that does proper meals like liver and bacon – so not for the faint hearted. It’s also a very particular ecologically rich environment on carboniferous limestone and sits above some fantastic cave systems which – in my reckless years – I loved to explore. These days it’s a gentle stroll on the surface that floats our boat. There are abundant droves and footpaths across the whole area and if you’re lucky you can enjoy moments of absolutely peaceful silence. Yesterday there were a few wildflowers in bloom, but most strikingly the Lesser Celandines were huge; the flowers were easily twice the diameter of their townie cousins in Bath. The weather forecast held to its promise of wall-to-wall sunshine and we strolled so heedlessly that we got lost at one point so we had to retrace our steps, fetching up eventually just above the entrance to Swildons where we leaned against a drystone wall and ate our sandwiches – bread rolls filled with ham and mustard and topped up with crisps.
It’s less than twenty miles from Bath and yet, 1000 feet higher, it feels remote; detached from traffic jams and stress. When I was a community arts worker the youngsters would come up here to collect magic mushrooms. This wasn’t a problem usually unless they were drinking rough cider at the same time, when they often got a bit unpredictable. Only my memories and the almost continuous stream of aircraft passing above on their way to and from Bristol airport remind me that there’s no escape from our folly.
Up at Newton Park farm shop the other day I spotted this Massey Ferguson tractor – identical to the one I used to drive when I was a groundskeeper about 100 years ago. I think it was a model 35 but I didn’t check this one. They were absolute pigs to start and so if you were selling one it would more easily find a buyer on the Mendips where you could bump start them with the benefit of a steep hill to run down in the morning. I once – with the help of a genius mechanic called Geoff – dismantled our 35 down to the last nut and bolt and then rebuilt it as a kind of winter project.
If I were an influencer, which – thank goodness I’m not, because it’s almost impossible to remember an occasion when I’ve ever influenced anyone – I might try to persuade you to buy an imaginary lifestyle aid from this imaginary pub in the countryside. Could one of my zircon encrusted (thanks Mr Zappa) podgers change your life?
This modestly brilliant idea came to me shortly after I typed the last few bits of data into the database of my plant finds which I started on August 21st last year and finished two days ago. It was always a pretty hubristic venture: to attempt to gather together all my random photos, notebooks and printed lists from the last fifteen years into one unified searchable database. It has been a huge deal; soaking up many hours and days checking and verifying all those years of misidentifications, absent locations and mystery plants in six thousand data chunks.
The idea of the lifestyle podger came into my head when I was trying to think of a way of harmonising all the things I (we) get up to. To name three, for instance, there’s botanising (looking for plants), allotmenteering and writing; any one of which could soak up every bit of energy I possess. An image from the past popped into my head which I thought might serve as a metaphor for juggling with half a dozen balls.
One of my first jobs was as a labourer in a steel erecting firm where I’d got in by lying about my ability to arc weld. I could write for days about that factory; the noise, the smells and the language – but I remembered a tool which I’m sure we called a bodger but which a bit of research reveals as a podger. So intense was the noise from the machinery we were using I was probably mishearing the ‘p’ for a ‘b’. My deafness and tinnitus now are in all likelihood the result of sawing up RSJ’s with a huge hydraulic saw and no ear protection. Anyway, when you reached the stage of putting the steel up with all its bolt holes correctly drilled you had to align the pieces which were heavy and difficult to manoeuvre into place, especially at height. The podger – a tool with a bent spike at one end and a spanner at the other – was how you did it. If you could get the podger through he corresponding holes in two lengths of rolled steel joist you could put the first and then a second bolt into place to align the pieces and then bolt them together securely.
My idea was to represent the airborne ballet of swinging lengths of heavy joist as we joined them together and made a structure from all the random pieces – as a metaphor for the way you might try to form all of the demanding activities of a life into a structure that makes some kind of sense. All I would need would be a form of invisible podger – and the nerve to believe that any kind of organisation is better than chaotically staggering from one demand to the next like someone with a huge credit card debt and just a few tenners to hold the bailiffs at bay.
And so – the Potwell Inn zircon encrusted lifestyle podger – on sale today at the heavily discounted price of tuppence – before the hostile reviews put me out of business!
I thought I’d be more pleased than I was when I finished bringing the database up to date. Seven months of work and I’d turned a heap of reminiscences into something sensational and powerfully useful, and yet the price had been to neglect writing on the blog – which slowed to a crawl, and to leave the allotment to its own devices for the whole of that time. When the unstoppable tide of spring started up a few weeks ago I was feeling completely demoralized; and months of sitting in front of a computer screen had wasted any physical strength and resilience I might have built up last season.
So it was time to wield the podger and align the elements in time for sowing, planting, writing and botanising while we waited for the campervan to be repaired after a botched cam-belt replacement had left us stranded on the motorway for hours. Words were exchanged with the garage owner who only slowly acknowledged his responsibility and offered to do all the repairs under warranty. The latest report on the blogging showed that the number of loyal readers (thank you all) is slowly increasing. Meanwhile we spent the time (planned for two missed adventures) on the allotment and the new season (at last) looks do- able. I suppose a time will come when our bodies will refuse to rise to the occasion but – it seems – not this year, praise be! Next year – with new knees installed, Madame will be dancing the tango once more.
A couple of days ago we were in a garden centre buying some new raspberry canes and a Malus for the container garden outside the flat when I ended up having a flirty conversation with a couple of women at the till. Madame thoughtfully stepped back and allowed me my moment in the sun; then later asked me if I was planning on bringing one of them home. Even the faintest miasma of possibility was further than I could stretch – and in any case we’re soon off to Cornwall for our first adventure of the season. I haven’t managed to bolt the bits of my life together yet, but my default melancholic disposition has slunk into the background.
Oh and a couple of discoveries that I made over the past seven months-
Always identify a plant on the day you found it and while you can still see it and look at the bits you’ll wish (ten years on) that you’d paid more attention to.
Don’t trust a mobile phone grid reference – they’ll sometimes leave you literally at sea. Those glorious lat and long numbers on the exif data will convert into a completely inaccurate National Grid reference that might have some poor soul in the future searching on the wrong side of the river.
Don’t disdain the very ordinary common plants. They lead fascinating lives notwithstanding their roguish reputation as weeds.
Notice everything. I’ve been seeing but not looking at the mistletoe plant above for ten years and never paid any attention to it. No idea why it suddenly popped into my mind.
The view up the Percuil river in Cornwall; March 2022. A place of peace.
Last night we streamed parts one and two of Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Bob Dylan – “No Direction Home”, and like so many veterans of our generation it triggered some complicated memories leading inexorably into that conversation about life changing moments. There’s never anything complicated or even related about these moments. For me, with “Hard Rain” – the song he was singing the first time I heard him – I was standing at the window of a house in Hartcliffe in a party where me and my best friend Eddy turned out to be the only guests of two girls we fancied. We were high up on a hill and I remember looking out across Bristol and knowing that after hearing Dylan nothing would ever be the same again. Notwithstanding our best efforts the night remained completely chaste and we all kept our jeans on, four in a bed. A couple of years later Madame and I found each other and the second great tsunami of our teenage years overwhelmed us.
Watching the film, many years later, I was completely captivated once more by Dylan’s capacity to own the song; to inhabit it (and I wasn’t one of those who hated his electrification). There was always that complete correspondence between the sung words and the experiences behind it, even when those experiences were not personal, but grown in the fibre of overlapping lives. That night I couldn’t sleep I was restless and troubled by another memory.
My route into Christianity (and out of it again!) was long, convoluted and often painful. I finally decided to throw my hat into the ring because living it out was the only way I could imagine ever finding out what it was about. (Madame finally said to me – “You’re not going to be a bloody vicar are you?”). Thirty years later I was increasingly dismayed by what so-called organized religion really stood for, and it’s a subject I don’t feel much need to enlarge on. However, concealed in the warp and weft of everyday unreflective religion are some practices of enormous heft and significance and singing was one of them.
There’s a song called the exultet (sometimes exsultet) which tradition demands is sung by the Deacon (a priest near the end of training in the Church of England). It’s a prolonged unaccompanied plainsong explosion of joy from some time between the fifth and the seventh centuries, and you really need to be taught it because the archaic notation passed out of common use centuries ago. So it fell to me to sing the exultet in the church to which I was sent on the first Easter eve after I arrived and I sang it for 25 years in the parish I took over; the last time being 10 years ago. The first time I sang it I’d been overworking (we all did) in the lead-up to Easter and on Good Friday morning I got out of the bath and slipped head first through the plate glass window of the bathroom. There was a great deal of blood, Our oldest child solemnly pronounced that I’d severed an artery and I would be dead within minutes; our next door neighbour came to help but after one glimpse of me naked and covered in blood she fainted. In the end I was saved by our other neighbour who, being a midwife, was used to that sort of thing and bound me up in towels and got me off to A&E. A waggish nurse asked if I wasn’t overdoing Good Friday, turning up there with wounds in my hands and feet and a huge sliver of glass in my side. Ha Ha I thought and then asked politely if it was OK to pass out. The next day was Easter Eve and I just had to sing the exultet. Some lovely gentle men came and cleared up the mess as I sat in the garden and contemplated my stitches. On Easter eve I swallowed a large glass of brandy on the advice of the choirmaster and organist and sang as if my life depended on it. Maybe it did.
The Easter vigil happens every year on the evening before Easter Day. It’s a long service of readings and psalms at the end of which all the lights are turned out and the first light of the new Christian year is brought into the church with great ceremony, prayers and responses. The big Paschal candle is lit and everyone in the congregation gets their small candle lit from the large one. When it reaches the stand where it normally lives, the exultet is sung into the candlelit darkness and silence. It’s an overwhelming experience to sing it – so overwhelming in fact that every year I had to lock myself in the church and sing it over and over again until I could stop myself crying as I sang. And here’s the link back to Bob Dylan. I was always possessed by the song. I never quite knew whether I was singing the song or the song was singing me. Thirteen hundred years of tradition, embracing billions of people and thousands of cultures I would never encounter, all seemed to be joining in the great song with me. I have never missed anything in my life as much as I miss singing the exultet.
When I retired from institutional responsibilities I also stopped singing; I stopped music altogether because I couldn’t bear it any more. George Bernard Shaw called it the brandy of the damned. I must be the world’s greatest sinner.
This is one of my favourite views of the allotment, looking west across the row of cordon fruit trees we planted five years ago. There’s a Victoria plum, a Bramley apple, a damson, a Conference pear and just out of frame a prolific apple that we’ve never identified. On the far side of the polytunnel are a dozen soft-fruit bushes and a further five apple varieties; oh and the lovely Tayberry growing alongside the tunnel. Perennials are such a gift. There are three rhubarb varieties next to the Tayberry; a Fulton’s Strawberry Surprise, A Timperley Early and a Victoria which all together keep us in fruit from early summer to late autumn. As you’ll see from the photograph, the paths have all been topped up with wood chips, and the raised beds with compost and leafmould. After a dire season last year and an arduously long winter we took the opportunity of a few days of sunshine to regain some kind of control – which led me into a chain of thought that led from our small plot of land to international economics.
It’s the word “control” that stopped me in my tracks. Understanding how dependent we are upon the weather and how vulnerable to all kinds of natural hazards and pests it would be all too easy to see nature as an opponent; a force that demands fierce and relentless vigilance – and so the temptation to resort to chemicals and traps to tilt the balance of power in our favour – and yes: faced with an outbreak of bindweed as we were last season; or asparagus beetle as we were for years, it would be easy to cave in and reach for the bottle. In fact we gave up and dug out the Asparagus bed which had never been productive; and took down the protective mesh surrounding the fruit cage, which the bindweed had treated like a climbing frame. Real gardening is like writing/genius (as described either by Mark Twain or Thomas Edison) – “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”.
If we’ve learned anything at all about nature over the decades, it’s that good gardening (and running a country well) is an act of continuous and humble collaboration. Plants either like where you put them and how you tend them or they don’t – and if they’re not happy they display all sorts of aberrant behaviour or (and then) they die. Growing a garden is a conversation between us and our plants; it’s a contemplative occupation punctuated as it was this week by muscle busting activity after a long winter layoff. Just now; with all the beds prepped and ready and the tunnel filled with its first temporary seasonal residents – there’s a brief lull before the good storm begins.
Coffee table gardening is full of sunny days and idle afternoons strolling between the roses and sipping champagne. Real gardening features a self-extending list of jobs that may or may not get done this season or indeed ever! Such strolling as time permits is fully occupied with a conversation which could land you in trouble with your neighbours if they could hear you talking to your plants. The reward is found in the kitchen while the failures land up in the compost bin along with all your regrets and wasted opportunities. Change takes time and experience is gained very slowly, but the payback is a kind of loving tolerance. The slug, the snail and the Cabbage White butterfly are as surely our neighbours as the veg we grow and they are likely doing things that benefit us, even as we curse them under our breath. Once we resort to threats and violence we have lost our standing with nature and like Cain in the Bible we will be reduced to wandering half starved in a desert of our own making and with no neighbours to give us shelter.
Of course, being human, I’m always tempted by the idea of control – and as I was mulling over this post another question dropped into my mind. Is my endless list making a part of my being that wants to get a grip on a world that can seem chaotic? As my database grows and my knowledge of wild plants extends, I feel a kind of peace as I tick off each find – “well at least I’ve got that one where I want it; sorted, ordered, fixed”. And why do I write this journal? perhaps because many days pass when I’m so battered by randomness I need to write to make some kind of sense of it. My days are not sufficiently measured by traditions, customs and calendars which really represent our human need for times and seasons. What’s so cruel about climate change is not so much increased morbidity as much as the general feeling of being lost in the no longer predictable. For a gardener, climate destruction is personal. The inner and the outer worlds; the macro and the micro are not different things but the same thing seen through different perspectives. The deranged madness of politicians and capitalists could easily become my own symptoms of madness and violence like a pitbull released from its lead and out of control. Be careful what you wish for: wealth and power are the crystal meth of international politics.
I used to think a lot about my literary heroes and role models. Years ago I realized that they are all outsiders in some sense; many of them created by Charles Dickens. I wanted to be Ham Peggotty, never David Copperfield and yet – many decades later – the character that feels most like me is Mr Dick – (stop that sniggering in the back row!) the gentle neurodiverse protegé of Betsy Trotwood who struggled through writing to make sense of his life, tormented by what she (anticipating Freud) called transference; haunted by his incarceration in an asylum and that of his sister too, and by the execution of KIng Charles the First.
Anyway, that’s enough miserable maundering from me. There was a real moment of inspiration midweek when I was logging some old photos and came across a plant I’d spent hours looking for one hot day in mid Wales near the Dolaucothi gold mine. I knew it was likely to be there but couldn’t find it. Amazingly I discovered this week that I’d already seen it in 2016 at Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire where – thinking it was oddly beautiful I took some snapshots and never properly identified them as Sanicle, Sanicula europaea. I sometimes wonder if I should waste less time cataloguing and get out there in the wilds. This week I was given the answer – it’s 10% taking the photo and 90% figuring out what it is!
Actually this photo of a Lenten Rose taken in Royal Victoria park – as you’ll see from the timestamp – was taken on January 15th. There are a few others taken more recently, not least the daffodils in the window boxes, but we’ve been horribly conspired against by the weather but also another project that’s grown and grown. A splendid example of mission creep!
I mentioned several posts ago that I’m building a searchable database, pulling together the botanical parts of over 10,000 largely undocumented photos that I’ve taken over the years. Mission creep was inevitable once I’d discovered the incredible power of modern software to sort, list and interrogate thousands of data points in a few seconds. My original plan was to list all the plants I’d photographed and properly identified; hoping to reach 100 species. That number was soon exceeded and I realized that I was seeing the same plants more than once, so should I record every one or just the first time? My distressingly ill-ordered collection of random pictures was mostly filled with plants that took my eye for some reason. Consequently it’s very light on the ordinary everyday plants like Broad-leaved dock which I’d known since childhood for its capacity to cool nettle stings. But I’d actually never bothered to photograph either the nettles or the dock leaves which left a large hole in my database. This, and a problem with the EXIF data which recorded dates in an American format led to a thoroughly dodgy list when first sorted by date, and the incorrect dates which were added in bulk – had to be found and altered one at a time!
What’s an unrecorded photo called? -well completely lost is the best answer. When most professionals make a mistake, they solemnly intone the phrase “lessons will be learned” and take a quick look to make sure their pensions are still secure. When we amateurs mess up we have to start over and repair the damage with no pensions to lose. We even have to beat ourselves up for our own stupidity. It’s a tough call.
However in my case lessons really have been learned because every photo has to be checked and double checked for ID, date and location. I’ve discovered that phone grid references can be a bit wonky – some of my finds have been a mile out to sea. That too is occasionally my own fault for failing to type the correct numbers in, so now I use a suite of six separate programmes to check that I’ve got it all right. Then there’s the thorny issue of sorting the garden escapes from the ghost orchids and that means looking at the mighty databases run by the BSBI and several others to check that the plant in question grows where I’m recording it. The Book of Stace always has the last word on whether I should record or remain silent. Occasionally I find something that’s really original and there follows arm wrestling with the gate-keepers to get my record accepted. Peaceful?? you’re kidding!
Luckily I’ve got an excellent memory and so in front of me now is a database entry no 417 for Pencilled Cranesbill, Geranium versicolour. I can tell you exactly where I saw that plant because its beauty took my breath away.
So that’s all taken up hideous amounts of time and affected my postings severely. Then we’ve both had abundant hospital appointments trying to get our various ailments under control to free up the summer for fun stuff. The campervan has had an even worse year than us and we’ve had to spend a great deal on getting it back on the road. All this culminated a major service, new cam belt, new alternator and brake renewal. Our first trip away was supposed to be this weekend to celebrate the beginning of spring in the Bannau Brycheiniog – Brecon Beacons in old money; but the fates had other plans and we got less than five miles down the motorway when the speedo and then engine failed completely. Reversing downhill without power, brakes or steering back to the hard shoulder with cars and lorries passing at 70+mph was a bit hairy but we made it without causing any major problems – with the help of a friendly lorry driver and spent six hours waiting for help to arrive – during which we were clearly being seen as elderly and vulnerable because we were visited by every patrol car and traffic officer in South Wales, and phoned every half hour to make sure we were OK, Someone even offered us some space blankets! Eventually and in the dark, a recovery vehicle turned up and loaded us up for a very short journey back to where we’d set of in the springtime of our youth. We went to bed with a sandwich and slept fitfully as I planned the next stage of recovery getting the van back to the guilty garage. As the AA man said – he didn’t believe in coincidences either. Needless to say the garage took a more cautious view suggesting that the engine failure might not be anything to do with them. Harrumph says I!
Oh and just to redeem the shining hour I photographed a dock leaf today
