Author: Dave Pole

I've spent my life doing a lot of things, all of them interesting and many of them great fun. When most people see my CV they probably think I'm making things up because it includes being a rather bad welder and engineering dogsbody, a potter, a groundsman and bus driver. I taught in a prison and in one of those ghastly old mental institutions as an art therapist and I spent ten years as a community artist. I was one of the founding members of Spike Island, which began life as Artspace Bristol. ! wrote a column for Bristol Evening Post (I got sacked three times, in which I take some pride) and I worked in local and network radio and then finally became an Anglican parish priest for 25 years, retiring at 68 when I realised that the institutional church and me were on different paths. What interests me? It would be easier to list what doesn't, but I love cooking and baking with our home grown ingredients. I'm fascinated by botany and wildlife in general, and botanical illustration. We have a camper van that takes us to the wild places, we love walking, especially in the hills, and we take too many photographs. But what really animates me is the question "what does it mean to be human?". I've spent my life exploring it in every possible way and the answer is ..... well, today it's sitting in the van in the rain and looking across Ramsey Sound towards Ramsey Island. But it might as easily be digging potatoes or making pickle, singing or finding an orchid or just sitting. But it sure as hell doesn't mean getting a promotion, beasting your co-workers or being obsequious to power, which ensured that my rise to greatness in the Church of England flatlined 30 years ago after about 2 days. But I'm still here and still searching for that elusive sweet spot, and I don't have to please anyone any more. Over the last 50 or so years we've had a succession of gardens, some more like wildernesses when we were both working full-time, but now we're back in the game with our two allotments in Bath.

Self-sufficiency? – not sure.

IMG_4517On Christmas Eve I dropped into Christmas mode again and by sheer force of habit by early evening I started to wonder what I wanted to say to my non-existent congregation.  I’d ended up cooking all day  – sourdough bread, morning rolls, gammon, lentil soup, sherry trifle (well it is Christmas), and a game terrine – the pheasants were a gift from an old friend. Madame timed shopping to the last minute and came home with a piece of beef at less than half price with some fish at 1/3 usual price.  It’s a high risk strategy but it works as long as you’re prepared to countenance a thin time for a couple of days. I love this time of year, when everyone makes an effort. Then Afelia for supper with two of the boys home with partners. In fact it turned into a multi-cultural celebration of Christmas Eve because after eating our family favourite Cypriot dish, our son’s Polish girlfriend brought a traditional Polish Christmas dish – pork, sausage, dried mushrooms and sauerkraut. It was delicious.  On Christmas Day we all gathered at son number two’s house with grandchildren and assorted friends for lunch.

But why the pig? We saw this fine animal in the woods at the Lost Gardens of Heligan and I instantly thought of one of my heroes – William Cobbett whose book “Cottage Economy” ought to be required reading for every child. His other book – “Rural Rides” is a wonderful and scabrous portrait of a countryside on the skids.  If you read it, bells will ring in your head, I promise.

This year on the allotment has been more productive than I can remember for years, but I worry a bit when people talk about self-sufficiency because I can’t see how we can claim all of the credit for the success of the season to ourselves.

you may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” (Deuteronomy 8:17)

That’s not a plug for any particular religion, by the way, but it’s a well expressed thought by an ancient writer who sees how dangerous the absence of humility can be.  If thoughts of self-sufficiency encourage anyone to separate themselves from their neighbours or to undervalue the gifts of health, weather and good fortune then it’s a dangerous philosophy. At best, I think, we can share thankfully in the generosity of an earth that’s beyond our understanding and upon which we are completely dependent. If gardening teaches anything it’s vulnerability and dependency. All the horrors of ecological catastophe stem from human pride, and from an extractive mindset that asumes the earth is there simply to obey our will. So no, I don’t care for the kind of “self sufficiency” that encourages foraging wild mushrooms to extinction and I don’t want to separate myself from the rest of humanity.  We’re all part of what Francis Schaeffer called the “glorious ruin” of our nature. So feasting is fine – the pig at the top is having a wonderful time – but the very essence of feasting is that we never deserve it, it is a gift that, like water becomes stagnant and dangerous if we try to dam it up and keep it to ourselves.

Orion’s dog nights

I can’t say that these days between the solstice and twelfth night are dog days because that description is reserved to the early weeks of August when everything is hot, sweaty and lethargic.  But the dog’s in there up to his shining teeth, on clear nights when you can see Orion’s belt and track to the left and there’s Sirius in all his shining brightness.

Orion was the first constellation I learned to identify for the entirely unworthy reason that my birthday being in December, my younger self took that as an invitation to party until term restarted in January – which meant that I spent a lot of excited and drunken nights wondering at the stars and what they might mean. Sirius was Orion’s hunting dog and so I feel bold to claim that these dog nights in December and January are the counterparts of their warm equivalents in summer; a time when not much work but a lot of wondering gets done.

However, work we must, whenever the weather clears for a few hours because when spring arrives in maybe three months, there will be no time for pondering and bed building. Neither will there be time to wonder what we should be growing and where the new compost bins need to go: we need to be ready.  We’ve more plants overwintering than ever this year, and today Madame planted out the last of the early broad beans while I got on with building another path and the base for the compost bins.  The first batch we planted last week have almost doubled in size already.  They’re Aquadulce Claudia so they’re perfectly capable of surviving the winter, and when we took them out of the greenhouse the roots were searching beyond the ends of the long Root-Trainers so they were more than ready to go. The peas too (Douce Provence) are doing well under their protective fleece, and the garlic, shallots and onions are well away, although it’s winter now. The allotment feels positive – as if it’s having a good time too.

I’m loathe to use any growing space for what might be thought of as a utility area, but I’ve become more conviced than ever that we need to up our game and we finally decided on three 4’X4′ bays in the middle of the plot and with a wide path beside it. We’ll treat compost just like any other crop and give it the best conditions and constituents we can so that our production will increase to meet our demand – less buying in and expense all round.

We also moved a rhubarb plant and two fennels that suddenly seemed as if they were in the wrong place.  This is a great time of the year for moving the furniture around – a couple of weeks ago we moved another rhubarb (Timperly early) and it’s already rewarded us with some new buds.

But these short days still feel like a holiday.  The seeds have all arrived, the heated propagators are cleaned and ready to go with the earliest sowings of chillies and with working time so limited we also need to take stock, take a big breath and prepare for next season. There’s much to celebrate and we’ve learned so much this season.  Every garden or allotment we’ve ever grown has had its own personality.  There are things it does easily and others it needs help with. Soil is as various as the people that till it, and our relationship with it grows and deepens like our relationship with each other.  On days like today the Potwell Inn merges imperceptibly with our real everyday lives and it feels good. The earth is very forgiving.

Solstice

What a difference in a year. The before and after shots are the second of the half-allotments. We took this one on in October 2017 and since then it’s been completely revamped and has given us excellent crops this season. If you look carefully you can see next year’s onions, shallots and garlic sending down their roots.

But today is the winter solstice and it has always brought out the pagan in me. It has seemed to me since I was very young that this still point – which will happen at 22.23 today when the north pole reaches its furthest tilt away from the sun and then begins to tilt back again is the true turning point of the year.  I don’t want to go into all the whys and wherefores of the Christian calendar, the Gregorian reformed calendar or, for that matter the argument as to whether Christmas or New Year is the more important. So far as i’m concerned as a gardener, this is a fundamental moment. Between the solstice and Twelfth Night comes the natural rest in the horticultural and agricultural year. Yesterday I talked a bit about Wassail, but in my old parishes we also celebrated Plough Monday when the local Young Farmers would carry an old Ransomes plough into Elberton church where I would bless the plough and the seed for the new season. As an aside I should say that the last time I tried to beg a bit of maize seed off a local farmer for the ceremony, she warned me not to touch it because it was treated with a systemic insecticide.  It certainly was, it was bright blue and looked (probably was) thoroughly dangerous and in its small way part of the reason for the destruction of the insects and bees. But there we are  – perhaps I should have nagged but they were good people whose farming practices were being deformed by the pressure to put profit before anything else.  Not many of their critics would have been happy to work the hours that they did for such small reward.

But back at the Potwell Inn we’re completely organic and today we shall be celebrating the solstice with our own roast potatoes, carrots, squashes, parsnips and brussels sprouts along with a piece of slow roasted beef and a glass of wine. Slow roasting is the most brilliant way of making the cheapest cuts taste wonderful.

This morning I was up way before dawn to finish off a sourdough loaf that had been proving all night.  Then a quick sprint to the sorting office to collect a delivery of seeds and then a couple of hours up at the allotment. The outbreathing of the earth is almost over and tonight the great inbreathing begins again. Strength light and hope to everyone who reads this.

The Littleton Wassail invitation arrives.

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7271a5a92013314423f264e49d8abac1At last the email from Mike arrived today inviting me to take part in the Wassail in early January. He’s not often as late as this and I was beginning to worry that something had gone wrong – or perhaps the Cider Club was blaming me for the poor season this year. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that my official blessings may not have the same efficiency now I’m no longer on the payroll as it were, but in truth I think it was ‘the Beast from the East’ that did the damage. Wassailing, if you didn’t know, is an ancient (well – medieval) tradition of blessing the apple trees and driving out the demons to ensure a good crop in the following season.  I was the parish priest of Littleton on Severn for a decade and so it fell to me to bless both cider apple trees and ploughs in my parishes as part of the old New Year traditions.  But our connection to the orchard goes back far beyond that because Madame worked as assistant to the trials Officer at Long Ashton Research Station in the early 70’s and she was responsible for producing the budwood for the orchard that subsequently became the home of the Littleton Cider Club. Who could resist the lore and language of cider with varieties like “Slack ma girdle” and ‘Goose arse’ Here’s my journal entry for last year:

Bigger than ever this year, and I was invited back to bless the orchard after the Green Man’s completely pagan poem and a good deal of Littleton Lifesaver being drunk by everyone except me. I felt a bit of a fraud ordering a pint of bitter at the bar, but I find the cider too scrumpy -like for my taste (and my digestion as well).

It was so nice to meet up with old friends, and everybody was really pleased to see me back. As the Wassail was taking place, the full moon was just rising behind the orchard. In the darkness the shotguns spurted smoke and flames from their barrels. Whether Mike had loaded them with black powder for the effect I don’t know, but it was very impressive. T quizzed me on which church I was attending and he chided me mildly when I said I wasn’t going anywhere. There were many extra visitors from far afield and one of them told Madame that they’d abandoned the Priddy Wassail because the health and safety brigade had all but ruined it. Happily no considerations of safety prevented the usual Littleton anarchy, and the fire was thrillingly dangerous after half an hour’s dosing with meths and heaven knows what else by way of accelerants. We had the Barley Mow Choir singing all the wassail songs they knew and later we watched the Mummers Play. All very patriotic with a youthful St George being raised from the dead and Beelzebub being booed lustily by us all. A great deal of rather rude banter. Good to be back!”

3b03c9ff55c93f267ce33a1d091ab6afSo that invitation to one of my favourite places and events cast a cheerful air on the rest of the day and later we grabbed the dry weather with both hands and went up to the allotment to carry on building the raised beds.  My earlier (and gloomy) ruminations on the quantity of topsoil we’d need to find have been mitigated by the way we’re constructing the beds. IMG_4050I’ve written earlier about the problem of waterlogging, so we’ve been constructing the paths between the bed as dual purpose soakaways and paths.  In practice that means a good deal of hauling up and back to the woodchip pile.  We’ve seen it suggested that woodchip robs the soil of nitrogen, and that would certainly be true if we just dug it into the beds, but used as a path material it supresses weeds, makes a comfortable all-weather path and also seems to rot down quite quickly, needing replenishing from time to time. We’ve not found any depletion of the soil in the beds at all, and we hope that these large reservoirs of composted material will add to the general condition of the plot in the long term.  I fix the bed edging boards in place first, and when they’re secure I dig out the path to about 18″ deep by just over a foot wide and throw that soil up on to the bed.  It doesn’t do the job entirely, but it adds around 20 cubic feet of soil to each bed. With compost added as well, the beds are raised by another four inches – all adding to the depth.  The photo is of two beds we constructed on the same principles earlier in the year.

Home later we feasted on a chicken and leek pie with our own carrots, leeks  and savoy cabbage. I love savoys, the flavour is so intense.  At first sight the leeks looked a bit messy with a touch of rust and the usual wear and tear on the outer leaves, and I wonder if that’s why so many people reject home grown in favour of the supermarket variety.  But 2 minutes with a knife and our veg are more than equal in appearance and twice as good in flavour than anything you could buy in a shop.

At last! the seed order

IMG_4796And there’s three pages of it, which sounds a bit excessive, but it’s a boiling down of all our previous seasons; garden visits (especially Heligan); conversations with other allotmenteers; oveheard radio and TV programmes and not least, many happy hours poring over the seed catalogues; googling; and the odd blind gamble. As the photo demonstrates, we’ve already got half packets of some of the varieties we intend to grow – even after this week’s purge of out-of-date ones, so a little of the expenditure is spread over from last year and not included.

What are the other costs of allotmenteering, then? Well, the rents come to £93.36 for our two half-plots. Last year’s other big expenditure was composted manure while we get our own operation up to speed and that cost about £200.  We’ll probably spend the same again this year as we build up the soil.  Add to that the cost of gravel boards, posts, pegs and the other materials required to make the beds and you can see that allotmenteering is by no means free. That’s the bit the coffee table books don’t tell you about when they sell the dream, but you have to see all this as a long-term investment. Nets, cloches and tools can last for years and so if we look after them we can write down much of this expenditure over the next decade.

This year we used five different seed suppliers.  It’s always worth checking what they’re charging and how many seeds there are in a packet.  Even the cost of postage can vary widely between companies so once you’ve decided what to grow, shop around for the best deal. Don’t leave ordering too late because some vegetables – especially the heritage varieties, but even those that just get a mention in an influential forum, will run out.

We’ve spent decades trying to garden on some pretty awful soil.  The last big garden was further up the Cotswolds on cornbrash which was quite productive but there was no real depth of soil and huge amounts of loose limestone rocks.  I remember chatting to the gravedigger one day (we lived next to the churchyard), and he said that if he had to dig in a spot where there was no access for machinery it could take an hour to dig an inch. It certainly felt that way when you pulled up the turf to break a new patch and took almost all the topsoil off with its roots. That was our first experience of raised beds and we got lucky.  The boards were free, courtesy of a builder who was renovating an old chapel and allowed us to take away all the floorboards. I knew a lorry driver who worked for a quarry company and I asked if he ever came across any topsoil.  I drove back to the house one day and found him with an enormous tipper lorry dropping off about 30 tons of lovely soil.  Then, in a similar vein, I asked a farm contractor if he could lay his hands on a bit of manure and a similar quantity was dumped outside our front door, (and very rich it was!).

Here on the allotments we’re much more fortunate with more than a foot of rich alluvial  clay/loam topsoil that’s capable of growing almost anything it seems, but is inclined to get waterlogged – hence all the organic material.

But is it worth it? We’re certainly out all weathers, and it can be hard physical work at times, so no gym subscription needed.  But the clincher is that we reckon the value of our produce exceeds the cost of producing it by at least 10:1 so long as you’re prepared to discount the value of your own labour and call it pleasure. If you think of the cost of organic vegetables and then add the bonus of having them so fresh they taste better than anything you can buy, and then the combination of tangible and intangible value makes allotmenteering a no-brainer.

I can see a clear blue sky through the window this morning and that means we can get out into the fresh air and maybe create two more beds for the overwintering broad beans we’ve started under glass. Last year we had very little sucess with freezing runner and French beans, but the broad beans froze well and taste miles better than the shop-bought ones. Is it worth it? See for yourself.

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“Industrial”? – a bit of planning that’s all.

 

 

One of our neighbours told us, back in the summer, that a friend of his had described our allotment as “a bit industrial” . I’m quite happy with that, although I would have preferred “purposeful”. I think some plots look like squatter camps but thank goodness the allotment is one of the few places left where we are free to express our individual preferences without too much interference. I recall Jim Callaghan’s brilliant put-down of Shirley Williams – “Just because she’s  scruffy she thinks she’s an intellectual”. Organic gardening is either purposefully planned or it’s a pile of old pallets and a carpet heavy with good intentions.  Once you’re serious about getting as close to self-sufficiency as you can with only 250 square metres to play with, you have to plan carefully and then hope that the weather plays along with you. We made the decision to go “no dig” last season, and we’re busy organising the whole plot into manageable beds according to the plan in the photo, so that we have access to beds 365 days of the year, never having to walk on them. However this has left us with the need to raise the level of the soil quite a bit to bring the plants above the waterlogged clay substratum that channels three or four streams down through the site – one of them almost certainly passing underground alongside the greenhouse. The design of the beds is to allow some of that water to drain towards the paths  and divert it away from us.

Last night in one of my regular periods dream gardening I eschewed counting sheep in favour of working out the cubic meterage of compost we’d need to make if we were to cover the whole plot with 5cm each year. I reckon it’s coming out at around 10m³ and that’s ten of our current 1m³ cylinders – a deeply sobering thought. The alternative would be to spend about £350 on buying it in. So how on earth could we possibly make so much compost, given that there’s no way of affording a commercial product.  As I wrote last week, there’s something that feels ethically wrong with throwing money at a problem, but even more important, soil is a living entity with its own ecosystem.  It’s not a neutral medium for supporting plants and feeding chemicals.  And so our ambition to fill our raised beds with good soil has to be achieved the slow way.

Here’s what we’ve got going for us:

  • One small household’s worth of green waste
  • A plentiful supply of dead leaves and woodchip
  • A plentiful supply of cardboard
  • A park opposite the flat that’s mown every couple of weeks in the summer leaving the mowings on the ground and easily raked up
  • All the green waste, trimmings, clippings and weeds from the allotment.
  • Occasional sacks of seaweed stowed in the car when we go up to North Wales. It smells so bad it must be good!
  • A small army of brandling who just love the cylinder.

I’m not at all confident that we can fill ten cylinders and reduce them to compost  in a year without giving them lots of stimulus to increase the heat.  Regular turning would help a lot, but the cylinders make turning very difficult indeed, and so I think we’re going to have to build a row of 4 bins –  4′ square and 5’6 tall and turn the load to the right maybe four times a season, adding wood ash, seaweed and “human activator” and trying as best we can to get the balance of green and brown waste exactly right. It would take up one whole bed, but the impact on the rest of the plot could be enormous.

Lots of fairly heavy work in prospect, then, but we both love a project.  The beds are nearing completion but the weather has been coming from the south west for ages, and that’s a wet quarter for us. Never mind.  We plan to celebrate the solstice on Friday with a slap up meal of all our own veg.  The only other job is to complete the seed order before then so we can truly look forward to next season.

 

Let’s hear it for the borlotti bean!

_1080674Almost all my experience of eating haricot type beans has been from tins, and I’d grown into the lazy assumption that they were all much of a muchness – worthy, protein rich and both floury and tastless; the kind of food you eat to become a better person. When I’m in Potwell Inn mode it’s true that I sometimes dig into my deep wells of idleness and the lively sceptical mind silts up a bit.   It certainly silted up on the subject of growing pulses.  We tried Borlotti beans about 10 years ago and although they grew well, when we’d shelled them and put them in a Kilner jar looking awfully pretty, we had no real idea what to do with them, and so they languished in their role as kitchen eye-candy until one day I was blind baking some pastry and thought I’d do something useful with them as baking beans in a quiche tin. Later, in France, we spotted a pile of them in a market.  “At last,” I thought, “I’ll ask how you’re supposed to use them”.  The response was a Gallic shrug and “je ne sais pas” – end of culinary research.

Sooo ….:   all these years later (visualize little filmic cliché effect with spinning newspapers), we grew them this season.  I know why: it’s because over the past couple of decades our food culture has changed beyond measure. My memory of allotments – and now I’m thinking of Mr King, a retired miner, and  yes there was a huge coalfield in South Gloucestershire –  my memory comprises potatoes, cabbages, celery that smelt of coal soot and, of course, red flowered runner beans.  These days we love new ideas and new vegetable species and all our cookery books are filled with exotic ingredients that supermarkets are pleased to stock as long as we keep buying them. Borlotti beans are almost passé now and so (as in most things) we clung to the disappearing coat tails of fashion and grew some. Now, of course, there’s an abundance of contradictory advice everywhere you look, but we were able to establish that you can eat them fresh and green – in the manner of broad beans, or semi dry when they need about 40 minutes to cook, or fully dried where you have to soak and pre-cook them – all the faff that put me off them in the first place. We also discovered that you can freeze them successfully when they’re in stages 1 or 2. Actually distinguishing between stages 1 and 2 is a bit tricky because on a real plant (as opposed to Gardeners’ World on telly) beans ripen at different rates and in any case, who hasn’t delayed harvesting for just a couple of days to see if they’ll fatten up a bit more.  Think courgette to marrow.

So in our freezer is a large bag of frozen borlotti beans which I reached into because I was cooking a sausage casserole, and I could make it into a cassoulet in a matter of seconds and get loads of brownie points from Madame.

New para! It really deserves a new paragraph because the beans are something different and entirely better than any canned or dried borlotti I’ve ever eaten. They have flavour, and that was something of a revelation to us both. In fact they transformed the dish from boring old sausage casserole to proper cassoulet. So this year we’ll grow a whole lot more for the winter because although we’ve still got lots coming on, the potatoes won’t last until the end of January and we need to factor in feeding ourselves well over the hungry gap.

 

Frugal? Thrifty? Tight …..

We have a bit of a surplus of carrots at the moment; largely our own fault for chucking seed at a bare patch of ground  in the summer “to see if they’d grow” – you know how it is, people are always saying things like “this allotment doesn’t do well with sprouts” and so, without any sort of planning we shoved in some Chantenay carrots and then when they germinated we sowed more Nantes. Of course plants are a good deal more resilient than we give them credit for and they’ve all thrived and kept us in roots for several months.  But now with the first frosts, the green tops have started to die back and so today we removed the tops, dug a few of the oversized ones for the kitchen and then covered the rest with fleece because we’ve nowhere to store them at the flat.  Ideally we’d have eaten them a month ago when they were at their sweetest and rather smaller, but we didn’t and so it’s stocks and soups for them. I’m not the greatest fan of carrot soup but Madame loves it and our children were fed gallons of the stuff when they were young and it never did them any harm;  in fact it was their favourite soup.

Eating things you’re not mad about hardly counts on the frugality scale, but I’ve noticed that generally speaking we’re more willing to give something new a chance if we’ve grown it ourselves. However I’m definitely not one to lecture the hard-up on making do with less.  I can’t think of anything more insulting or pointless than lecturing homeless people on the money that can be saved by making your own granola.

But sometimes the thrift goes bad on you and today we had a particularly fine example.  We were up at the allotment grabbing a few dry hours  with great joy and catching up with some outstanding jobs.  Top of the list was planting out as many of our infant broad beans as possible and then it was carrots, cleaning up around the brassicas to discourage pests (especially slugs) and giving the overwintering peas some breathing space. Weeks ago I sowed four rows of Douce Provence which will overwinter in the UK and give an early crop.  When we removed the fleece we found that three rows had germinated perfectly – pretty much 100% – but the fourth was quite empty. What could have been the cause? We postulated a mouse with OCD that only eats seeds in straight lines but that seemed a bit far-fetched even to a couple of old hippies.  We discarded every possibility until, at last, I recalled that I’d run out of seeds for the last row and found a few in  packet in the shed. It took two minutes to discover that the seeds in row 4 were one year out of date – just one.  I’d always assumed that the germination rate declined slowly in a nice gentle downward curve, but no – evidently these peas had all switched off simultaniously, like lemmings charging over a cliff.

So as soon as we got back home I checked our large and completely disorganised collection of old seed packets and discovered that over a half of them were out of date, so they were all ditched.  More surprising was the fact that we’d bought several packets of out of date seeds from a local garden centre this year. So we shall be carefully checking the use-by dates from henceforth.  I had no idea that parsnip seeds are only viable for one year, for instance.  Prior to that my worst experience with seed was trying to germinate Sweet Cicily  which seems to demand an absolute beating with severe weather before it will consent to poke out a single cotyledon.

But by the time the rain started again we’d got the broad beans in and ‘though I say it myself …. etc. I even managed to get one more board up and finish a wood chip path. Now we are both aching, but we’ve got a rough and ready cassoulet in the oven and everything in it apart from some sausages and the celery was grown by us.  In the spring, when the allotment is all expenditure and no returns, it’s easy to wonder whether it’s worth the expense. In December you know it really is worth it.

Later again I walked to the local supermarket to buy milk  – we don’t drive 25 miles to get organic milk from a friend’s vending machine because that would be silly!  Imagine my joy at seeing that the use-by date is 21st December, the solstice. So use-by dates bring sorrow and joy in the same day.  That could be the subject of an exceptionally boring sermon.

 

Winter thoughts at the Potwell Inn

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In the world of virtuality that we bloggers inhabit, it’s tempting to create a parallel unverse in which we are self-perfecting and untouched by the blights that affect lesser mortals. And so, by carefully selecting from the events of the day and choosing our words as poets might, we convey our privileged position on the sunny highlands of human consciousness without for a moment descending into bragging.

It will be a strange sort of book, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree ; – & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be as ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves.  Yet I do mean to get to the truth of the thing , spite of this.

Herman Melville in a letter to Richard Henry Dana on the first draft of Moby Dick

I read blogs. The best of them fire me up and get me back to work, but the worst of them make me feel inadequate – as if the only place to start a new life is “anywhere but where you are”. I see photographs of perfected lives, perfected allotments and perfected meals and I know that I could never compete. Nobody’s going to stick my face on an advert for the good life, so I created the Potwell Inn as a place where the real, the blight, the shit that happens, has a place as well – a place that I’m allowed to live in because I am fallible, I am human and I have never lost the longing for something better.

The Potwell Inn, in its first iteration by H G Wells, is set in the South Downs and it’s all orchard and grass and gently murmering river. It doesn’t rain – in fact the sun seems never to stop shining – but over everything hangs the shadow of Uncle Jim who may return at any moment in a drunken fury. H G Wells knew better than to write a novel of perfection.

So, mea culpa, in all my postings I’ve never mentioned anything much more frightening than allium leaf miner or a late frost; and you might run away with the idea that the Potwell Inn and its allotment exist in a faery glade at the edge of an exquisite Georgian city. It’s true that the city we live in has a lot of Georgian architecture – we’re lucky enough to live on the edge one of its most beautiful parks.  But Bath itself is a monster with a severe personality disorder that can’t make its mind up whether it’s a University town, a Roman tribute act, a continuously ‘in session’ meeting of the Jane Austin fan club or a vibrant modern shopping/eating/clubbing experience. In fact, “Bath – the experience” occupies a limited area at the centre and it’s surrounded by a hinterland that’s not so lucky.  Our beautiful Georgian terrace comprises mainly houses in multiple occupation filled with a shifting population of students, young families unable even to look in an estate agent’s window, and housing assocociation properties many of which have some deeply troubled residents.

So we live in a lovely flat near the centre of a beautiful city and the corner of our street next to the flat is a favourite spot for drug dealers because there’s no CCTV and there are four or five escape routes inaccessible to a police car if trouble kicks off. Through our windows we can enjoy a view of the river and the trees and also – at times –  violent domestic disputes, machete wielding ‘county lines’ enforcers and crack smoking minor league dealers on bikes. Most of the trouble never comes near us – just once I was the victim of the most pathetic attempted mugging in history. There’s a young man who lives a block away who we call ‘mong’ because he shuffles around as if he is permanently on spice or ketamine. He’s well over six feet tall so potentially could be a bit frightening if the fog ever cleared. I came down the road and despite the fact that he was already holding a mobile, he said “give me your phone” in his best menacing tone. I replied “fuck off!” in my most menacing OAP manner, and he said “there’s no need to be rude”. He probably had a good polite upbringing some time back.

The police and the local council are having a purge on rough sleeping and street begging in the centre because it scares the tourists. Naturally this means that the problem moves outwards towards us and street begging becomes petty crime – burglary, shoplifting, stolen bikes, muggings and such like. Sustaining a £200 a day habit either means a good begging pitch in town or something much more scary around the edges.  Our posturing local councillors – many of whom are part of the problem inasmuch as they own property and let it out at increasingly ridiculous rents – like to grandstand with talk about ‘zero tolerance’ but that does nothing to help the elderly residents who are terrorised by dealers and users.  We have no police station any more, and our air quality is so polluted by heavy traffic that we regularly break EU limits. So that’s where the Potwell Inn can be found – not in an  idyllic imaginary parallel world, but here on a cold December day when it’s too wet to get on to the allotment (again).

But this is where we’ve chosen to live and we love every moment. I’ve always had a conviction that there’s no better place than where you are set down, and the best way to live a flourishing, fully human life is to transform the place you live in rather than spend a fortune in time and energy looking for somewhere better. And so we get involved in the local neighbourhood and in its politics.  We all know that the source of many of these problems is lack of compassion and lack of resources compounded by a malignant ideology.  We love the fact that we can hear a dozen languages and more every day on the streets and we can shop in half a dozen food cultures within a mile.  We love the allotment and its capacity to provide for us, and our neighbours who live such interesting and occasionally complicated and exotic lives.

In one of those long meandering chains of thought that sometimes sieze my attention I began ten days ago with watching the riots in Paris on television and emerged 24 hours later with a changed perspective. That change of perspective took me to a single word; a crystallisation of the chain of thought and it was the word “commonwealth”.  The absence of the capital letter is absolutely deliberate because it is not a proper noun.  It doesn’t refer to any of the manifestations of the original idea that has been misappropriated so often from the days of Cromwell’s parliament to the cultural remains of the British Empire. It’s been so often misappropriated, in fact, that when I googled it, I looked at 27 pages of results without finding a single reference to its original meaning – a political community founded for the common good. This lovely idea seems to me to be slap bang in the middle of the Potwell Inn mission statement, or it would be if we had one!

I wondered for a long while whether to post this, and here it is. A provisional mission statement for the Potwell Inn, driven by the sheer baffling and beautiful complexity of human flourishing.

Commonwealth: A political community founded for the common good.

 

I’m not as young as I was

Philosophically speaking that statement is always undeniably true, but these last two days have offered plenty of reminders – not least my 72nd birthday on Monday followed by our 51st wedding anniversary today. Who’d have believed you were that old? (I rather hope I) hear you say but after a day on the allotment building paths and beds I believe I am a little older than the 35 I usually admit to. Sunshine in December is never to be ignored and the broad bean plants have germinated and are heading towards unruly adolescence so the question of preparing the bed for them is not theoretical. But the recent rain has saturated the ground, and so the allotment is saturated at about 12″ below the surface making it imperative to get beds and paths workable as soon as we can or else we shall be driven off the land altogether for months.

So at last the east-west path is completed and filled with about 6″ of woodchip.  Our two plots are side by side so it’s a very long path and quite a feature.  I’ve been mulling over whether I should give it a name – 5th Avenue or Broadway, in honour of several lovely trips to New York.  But being just a bit rigid about these things I felt that those rather hyperbolic names should be reserved for the north south paths, so that leaves something like Columbus and West 103rd for the new path.  I rather like biblical names as well, and I’d almost decided to call the water butts Tigris and Euphrates however that leaves one butt without a name, but it does suggest the possibility of Straight Street for the new path. I realize that American readers are more likely to be biblically literate than our fellow UK allotmenteers, but the small problem of two nations divided by a single language becomes clear with “butt”.  So I’ll let the whole question of giving names to paths rest for the time being.

The practicality of pegging the boards is always made much harder when it’s wet. If the pegs are wet they split when you hammer them in, but even if you keep them dry you need to make quite a large hole with a crowbar to get them started, and the wet clay sucks the end of the bar to the extent that it requires heroic strength to pull it out again. Madame told me that my grunts and curses were providing great entertainment to passers by on the footpath.  Obviously she told me that after we got home! However I did finally get about 40′ of edging in, at which point I realized that we would need prodigious quantities of topsoil to raise the beds above the wet zone and level with the top of the boards. The earth is hungry and seems to absorb an awful lot of compost, seaweed, leaf mould and manure, but it is slowly improving. I did a quick calculation and I think each bed would need approximately 1.3 tonnes of topsoil to bring it level.  That’s about £75 per bed and we’ve got eight beds that need raising – that’s £600 and I dread to think how many wheelbarrow loads. Way beyond our budget and frankly I’m not a fan of throwing money at the problem in any case.  So that leaves all the free methods we’ve access to, and a big effort on the compost front.  Time and patience solves most problems, and gives the allotment a kind of ecological integrity.

Later, with our wedding anniversary fast approaching we sat side by side on the bed rubbing a shared tube of Voltarol into our sore knees in a companionable sort of way.  There are some scenes you can never imagine when you’re twenty one years old. It’s not the capacity to do the jobs that’s lacking, it just takes a lot longer to recover.  But I’m feeling immensely proud of what we’ve achieved and I’m so looking forward to next season.  Suddenly there’s a foretaste of spring in the air.  We woke today to the sound of  a blackbird singing.  It’s often like that hereabouts,  we get a taste of the season to come and then the door slams shut for a few months, but it will come with a new beginning and new challenges.

I’m sitting on the seed order, unwilling to commit to just one selection.  I feel like a child in a sweet shop.