Month: January 2026

KIng Charles the Martyr – in a jar?

When you’re as old as me, you’ll probably find yourself saying “many years ago; when ….” – rather too often, since that’s the point when you realize that your children no longer care about, let alone believe your stories. But I’m not going to be caught out that way. I’ll merely say …….

I was on a silent retreat in a Franciscan convent in Dorset and since I was the only man present I was sequestered alone in a cottage on the edges of the estate. Meals were conducted in silence apart from the first five minutes of the one o’clock news on the BBC controlled rigidly by the Superior. Conversation was not allowed and so you had to learn some kind of sign language to get hold of the salt. The silence was only broken once – this was in the period of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest pomp – when it was announced that she’d shut down a couple more coal mines and a steelworks. One of the younger sisters was unable to contain a long snort of hatred and derision. We shared a conspiratorial smile among ourselves and went on with lunch – knowing that if we didn’t eat it all, it would come back meal after meal until it grew whiskers. I remember an old friend, a retired orthopaedic surgeon saying on his 90th birthday that the trouble with thriftiness was that you never got to eat a decent apple. The table rituals were both arcane and hilarious. We were each given a coloured napkin ring and told to sit at whichever place we found it on. What we weren’t told was that no one could leave the table until the final napkin was rolled and replaced in its ring. Needless to say I was the first victim of the rule, but I got my revenge by making everyone wait for each subsequent meal by sitting there beaming until I got bored. It was there that I discovered that I’m absolute rubbish at silence. I much preferred the Benedictines where they were still silent but you got a glass of wine with lunch and one of the monks read aloud from an interesting book.

Anyway the Franciscans were devotedly high church Anglicans and one of the curiosities was their attachment to martyrs, not least King Charles 1st it seems. By and large they were a radical bunch who really did walk the walk, but I was caught out by a jam jar on the table at breakfast time which was plainly labelled “King Charles the Martyr”. God knows (I thought religiously) what’s in there and I wish it would be marmalade but the thought that it might actually contain some sort of relic held me back. A single hair or fingernail would have made me feel very ill. And in any case was it entirely correct to celebrate the memory of the slaughtered king by eating him? Was this sacramental food in some arcane sense? or was it a witty joke by a rebellious sister? and if not – what?

Madame and I really like marmalade, but ever since the invention of Hartley’s “New Jam” – which was as watered down as “New Labour” turned out to be and then sold in smaller jars to add insult to injury, shop bought marmalade- in fact most shop bought jam too has lost most of its fruitiness because it’s lost most of its fruit. If you want the real thing you have to make it yourself. The Potwell Inn has one small problem in that I prefer my marmalade chunky and Madame likes it thin cut with as little peel as possible. This results in half finished jars having all their juices spooned out leaving dense faggots of orange flavoured brushwood at the bottom. I bear it bravely but it gives me terrible hiccoughs. I will get to the point ASAP.

So my family always made marmalade and home made jams, preserves and pickles have always been part of my life. My mum strayed from the path of righteousness at some point in the past and started to use the tinned, pre-shredded and cooked to be sold in giant tins. It didn’t feel right and we’ve never yielded t0 the temptation. If we’ve done the numbers right, we have marmalade all year round but sometimes we run out and then the wait for early January when the Seville oranges come in is a festival of longing. This year and true to tradition they arrived on January 2nd. It was only this week that I finally joined the dots regarding King Charles the Martyr. His execution took place on December 30th and so it’s just possible that the Sevilles arrived a bit early the year of my retreat and that Sister Angela, or whichever one was cooking that week, commemorated the religious festival on a jar of marmalade. It made me think of the Benedictine aphorism that “to work is to pray and to pray is to work”

But marmalade making is equally a thanksgiving festival for me; along with Christmas puddings and Christmas cakes. It’s impossible not to think of my mum and my gran as I’m chopping and simmering, boiling and bottling. It’s a ceremony that requires faith in the future; that we’ll be there to enjoy all fifteen jars in the course of this new year. It’s our opportunity to prepare and eat the best of food rather than the blandest and cheapest industry can manage. It’s hard work slicing the peel of 4 Kg of oranges and I have to keep sharpening the knife. My hands and wrists ache from the effort but it gives a long space of time to meditate and savour the grace of the ingredients and their journey to our kitchen where they fill the flat with their lovely fragrance. The whole act of making marmalade collapses time, prompting an escape from all the anxieties of the present moment, and it’s free; no books (the recipe is so simple) no gurus, churches or self-help groups; and if praying for King Charles 1st is your bag – that’s fine too; it wouldn’t be mine but feel free if its yours.

The Sisters and the Covent are long gone, scattered across the country and perhaps absorbed into other groups but I remember them with great fondness. The Franciscan movement has something to say to us, even now. They could be trailblazers in the search for a new and all embracing spirituality of the natural world – it’s there in the foundational writings of St Francis from the beginning. Every religious movement has to learn to live with its Jabez Bunting and its Brother Elias. The women did better with Hildegard of Bingen and Sister Clare, but there’s always a battle between the bureaucratic and the visionary when the founder dies and the battle for succession begins.

As for the Potwell Inn we opt for the quiet life and do our best to preserve it.

On plants and parasites

For the most part, over the years, I’ve seen New Year more as a celebration that the old year is over and done with and that January 1st is no more than a blank canvas. But this time it was different because 2025 was pretty rubbish, what with innumerable health problems and having to spend a fortune getting the campervan fixed. By the end of the year the health problems along with the van repairs were largely sorted and we were free to resume our itinerant lives; gardening, exploring and recording wildlife and camping unencumbered by worries. It was an exhilarating feeling to be set free to imagine once again. The three resolutions of last year were largely fulfilled and I lay awake making excited plans for 2026.

So after the most optimistic start to 2026, I had a sudden attack of dust and ashes, partially caused by this plant. It’s called Greater Dodder and it was growing so inconspicuously down by the river I would probably never have noticed it. Fortunately the leader of the BSBI New Year plant hunt that we were on, clocked it and we all gathered around to see a very unusual (RR in the books) plant. We’ve seen its much more common relative in Pembrokeshire and North Wales but it was a lovely surprise to see it growing on our local patch. It’s a parasitic plant, related to bindweed (gardeners feel free to hiss) and this one grows especially on nettles.

However the excitement was followed almost straight away by the sense of disappointment that I hadn’t found it for myself. Anyway I photographed it and when we got home looked it up in the books and discovered that it’s been here near the river in Bath for a few years at least and that it prefers growing near water. In fact – to borrow a term from the police procedurals on the telly – it’s got form – a great reminder that the more you know about wildlife preferences the more likely you are to find what you’re looking for.

And so the roller coaster in my brain continued for a while as I pondered how to record it – and as spring follows winter the idea dropped into my mind that it would be a good idea to extend my database to include all the other things we find on our walks; birds, fungi, insects, ferns, slime moulds ( a recent obsession) and lepidoptera because we’ve now got a portable moth trap that won’t take up too much space in the campervan.

It sounds so easy doesn’t it? extend the database which lives in a spreadsheet file so that instead of having to open separate files for each interest, it all sits on one very large spreadsheet so I could, for example, look at everything we found on a certain day, or everything we’ve ever found in a certain place; I could assemble lists for every purpose and even draw pie charts. I was (temporarily) on fire at the possibility of using AI to do all the heavy lifting and slept very badly, basking in the excitement and imagining fine days in Cornwall walking down to Percuil, looking for orchids and listening to the Curlews calling on the mud flats; or in the Bannau Brycheiniog watching the mist below in the valleys or in North Wales feasting on wild mushrooms and watching gannets dive bombing the sea.

That lasted as long as it took to sit in front of the computer and figure out how to do it. My grasp of spreadsheets and how to manipulate them is minimal to non-existent. I am at the sub-beginner level – I just make lists – so I started slowly by finding out that a tab on a spreadsheet is not the same as a tab on a beer can or the one on an ancient typewriter and I set up a new tab (page) marked fungi and tried to copy and paste my list of fungi into the newly named “Biological Records” spreadsheet – oooh posh! – where it promptly fragmented and after a bit of blokey random key pressing disappeared altogether. A frantic reverse ferret move revived the patient but everything was in the wrong columns. It dawned on me that I was in for an agonising long haul – studying things that I really don’t like in order to study better the things that interest me most. No pixie dust, just slog and brain fog like learning to solve differential equations in school.

Dodder – Cousin Bronwyn from West Wales beasting the Gorse.

Self doubt closely resembles Dodder and its cousin in the photo at the top, Lesser Dodder. It coils around your brain and sucks it dry; replacing the creative juices with dust. Like Restharrow – a different tangle of a plant that does what it says on the tin and stops a horse-drawn harrow in its tracks. It’s the curse of all self-taught people to defer instinctively to the careless wisdom of those who had an academic career in gnats’ navels and who believe their qualifications trump the more common muddy boots kind of knowledge gained by the hoi polloi. [That should properly read ….. ‘gained by hoi polloi’ because hoi is the definite article in Greek, but if I wrote it that way I’d be denounced as a pedant]. And so we, the great unwashed, struggle with the pronunciation of long binomial names like Pseudoperonospora humuli and remain silent rather than have a go at it. The trick is to put the stress on the third syllable before the last and say it with conviction. The political theorist and philosopher Gramsci called people like us “organic intellectuals”. It’s a term I’m proud to embrace because it puts me in the company of the miners and railway workers, the millers and machinists and labourers who taught themselves to the highest levels and founded institutes and even invented the health services, ambulance clubs, cooperatives and friendly societies that protected their communities from hardship and exploitation by hard-nosed industrialists, the parasitic human subspecies of Dodder.

After a couple of hours trying to get my head around the entirely unfamiliar vocabulary of computer spreadsheets I didn’t just feel depressed, I felt stupid. I’d still got a mountain of identifications to do with no prospect of getting everything done before the new season kicks off in earnest. But then Madame suggested a walk and that lifted the mood. It’s been very cold with icy winds for days, but there’s been abundant sunshine and we’ve had some lovely walks along the river. Slowly the precious feeling of optimism and hope warmed our fingers and toes and we began to talk about journeys waiting to be made. I will get the spreadsheet working, write my million words and we will make our planned travels around the galleries and churches of Wales to see the cruelly unacknowledged glories of Welsh art. We will hunt for birds and plants, moths and butterflies as if we were in the Amazon jungle, and we’ll dip our feet in the sea again like we did when we were teenagers in awe of the turquoise sea and dracaenas of Falmouth.

Too old for that sort of malarkey? My dears, you have no idea!