Category: About the Potwell Inn

A Melancholy River: Severnside I.

The second Severn crossing at Severn Beach, looking towards Chepstow

Maybe I’m being a bit unfair, labelling the river Severn as melancholic. That’s largely projection on my part. You can see from the thickness of the sea-wall that it deserves a lot of respect. The speed, force and sheer height of the tides makes the Severn a dangerous river to navigate. The second biggest rise and fall in the world gives it not just the appearance of power but also the sound of it. The unmistakable song of water on the move; riffling the banks as a farmer might roll a full head of grain between thumb and finger to feel the measure of the harvest; investigating the cornice of field edge here, a length of stock fence or a fallen tree. A fast flowing river is hungry.

But the Severn is also a tidal river as far as Gloucester. It breathes: rises and falls; rises and falls; breathing inwards and outwards twice a day every 12 hours and 25 minutes – constantly moving against the times of sunrise and sunset because the tide belongs to the moon, which is why the Severn is female and has been so since Celtic and Roman times. The tide flushes its banks for 25 miles as a river and a further 15 miles if you include the estuary where it meets the Bristol channel. But the Moon is in a constant elliptical orbit around the earth and so the highest and lowest tides – the springs and neaps – which cover a tidal range of between 12 and 15 metres, forty to fifty feet of variation at Avonmouth, occur according to the gravitational pull around full and new moon. At these times the funnelling of upstream tide on the river, particularly around Arlingham, meeting the downstream flow from beyond Gloucester, causes a surge wave known as the Severn Bore, twice a day for about 130 days every year. The biggest surges gather abundant spectators and surfers as the wave moves upstream. But there’s even more. On January 30th 1604 a tsunami wave over 25 feet high and travelling at 30mph barrelled up the Severn inundating villages and killing thousands of people. The churches at Littleton on Severn and Oldbury on Severn are built on raised ground and may have escaped the worst. In 2001 during the Foot and Mouth crisis I stood in Oldbury churchyard and witnessed the sight and smell of thousands of cattle being burned in giant pyres. So yes, I think some element of mournful is justified.

On the other hand, the Severn can be a great solace. Just as I would go fishing, if time was short I could always drive down to Shepperdine and walk up the path towards Oldbury. At dusk it is at its most mysterious as the lights come on across the river and the navigation lights indicate the safe passage for boats. Occasionally a skein of geese will fly overhead and once I was near the old Windbound when a hare careered up the field alongside and flew across the fence within feet of me.

The place I choose to call Severnside is a variable strip of land to the west of the A38 and the motorway. When we first moved to the area I was convinced that the locals were rotating road signs to keep people out. It has more in common with fen or wetland than anything else. Fields are small, drained by rhynes (pronounced reens) and small scale farming is the only show in town. It was once – and still is – a good place to grow apples, especially cider apples because the mass of water nearby acts like a gigantic night storage heater. Frosts visit the orchards less frequently than in the rest of Gloucestershire. Sheep still graze in the orchards. When I wanted some real peace I would cycle down there and drink in the isolated atmosphere. It’s easy to get lost in the multiple lanes and tracks but easier to lose yourself and your troubles.

The job was relentless, and I was the recipient of many confidences, not all of them good or comforting. People would share their troubles but they would also share their stories; stories that connected them and me back in history. Every pastoral visit, every wedding, baptism or particularly funeral would yield a rich harvest of stories which I rarely wrote down; but as time went on I became increasingly aware that without ever volunteering for the job I was becoming the Story-Keeper. As I grew close to retirement after 25 years, that sense of responsibility weighed on me more and more as the population changed from a largely farming, fishing and quarrying community to a commuting village which exploded in size to accommodate workers in the two (now decommissioned) nuclear power stations at Oldbury and Berkeley. A trajectory that was accelerating and which would never change. For ten years after retiring I felt constrained to keep quiet, but by now most of the old folks are dead and even the incomers who were’t averse to a bit of bullying and harrying have mostly passed on. The congregations in the churches I cared for were (largely) wonderful; the diocese did nothing but increase the workload. The river was my escape and consolation; it was big; vast and utterly indifferent to my troubles, successes and failures. I started to photograph the plants – never quite sure what they were called – the abandoned barges and the machinery that accompanied the drainage channels; the orchards and cider houses. It was my escape. The birds, the wind, the sound of the water, the larger ships entering and leaving the canal at Sharpness. It was OK to be a lost soul there, and so I’ve started to reunite some of those photographic memories with words. Even melancholy has its joys.

A Melancholy River: Severnside II.

A riverside culvert between the River Severn and the Sharpness Gloucester canal.

No I haven’t got the numbering wrong – Part One of what looks like it might be a series is yet to be written; I’ll do it today because like all writers I’m driven by the material which has been demanding that I set it down since I retired ten years ago

I’m not even quite sure what started my imagination boiling but it may have been this photograph, or rather me standing on the banks of the Severn wondering whether it would ever be possible to create image rich writing, linking words and photographs in a way that tells a story but leaves it up to the reader to decide where to start and where to leave. In those days, 20 years ago, The technology was difficult to use and demanded a skill set I never possessed and much more powerful hardware than I could aspire to.

But what I couldn’t show in a single photo was what was behind me on the riverside. It’s a raw and often windswept landscape up there on the Severn. At the point where it joins the Bristol Channel it’s a bleak industrial wasteland and the river itself is unreachable, hidden behind a railway line, giant storage silos, abandoned flour mills, a maze of conveyor belts and gas tanks. For the first mile or so north it continues in much the same way. Huge windmills rotate slowly and, nearby, a pair of gas power station chimneys steam and occasionally belch cumulus clouds that you can see from the motorway which runs two or three miles away along the ridge. You would have to possess a perverse imagination like mine to find much joy in it. There’s even a signposted “Smoke Lane”; there are cement works, lorry depots, warehouses, garages and tyre services and if, like me you have a long memory you could see where Imperial Smelting once stood; and the site of the Albright and Wilson chemical works that blew up after a paperwork mixup united two incompatible and dangerous chemicals; shut down the two motorway bridges and locked the occupiers in thousands of homes as the noxious fumes spread. Further on, the place where the Philblack (later Sevalco) works once covered the landscape with black carbon dust which is an important ingredient of car and lorry tyres.

Gradually as you drive further on, the river appears beyond a narrowing strip of shrubby grassland; the falling tidal flow brown and thick with the sediment it’s picked up on its long journey from the Pumlumon Fawr range in Wales where it begins, so I read, as a hard to find series of small springs. It’s as ugly as sin is alleged to be, and yet, maybe, I’m the greater sinner because I love it. These industrial landscapes are something! Every time I drive along that road I hear the voice of Bob Dylan singing Hard Rain.

I know, I’m not selling it very well but post industrial sites are my thing; dramways, abandoned coal pits, lead and manganese mines all have their botanical survivors and the aficionados who hunt them. The grim road continues north towards the two Severn bridge crossings, passing Severn Beach where birders find a great deal to interest them including Little Owls and all manner of migrating birds. Severn Beach was also, once upon a time, a destination where the single track railway brought thousands of visitors to paddle in the muddy water, bathe in the Blue Lagoon (well actually it was painted blue) and shelter from the wind in rented beach huts. There was even an amusement arcade and cafe owned by a traveller family that I subsequently got to know. One elderly lady I used to visit in Bristol had black and white photographs of the family beach hut on her mantlepiece.

This 25 year old picture of me was taken near the turnstile of the Aust Ferry turnstile where Bob Dylan departed for Cardiff on his controversial electric tour.

Onwards and northwards through Pilning, past the now closed but still a bit whiffy rubbish tip, the old road to the ferry terminal which, when the ferry closed become a favourite dogging spot (I’m told!), and into the more salubrious ruralities like Aust who refused to allow me to take responsibility their church after an unfortunate interview with the churchwarden and his wife who took an instant dislike to me. It was a happy escape for us all. The end of the M48 bridge was where my parishes began and ran upriver to the diocesan border to somewhere near Oldbury on Severn. I had skin in the game!

So why do I call myself Severnsider? given my lukewarm enthusiasm for its tidal estuary. Good question. Here- maybe – is part of the answer

One of the scuttled vessels at the Purton ship’s graveyard.

Behind the culvert in my first photo there is this hulk, plus many others, scuttled on the river bank. I used to go fishing on the canal. Pastoral work can be pretty punishing and after a particularly hard funeral – children for instance – I used to go there, more to sit quietly than to catch anything. Canal fishing is a difficult and specialised skill. In parish ministry you become the lightning rod for a lot of horrible situations and there’s no-one you can tell or talk to. The river runs alongside the canal at Purton and this mysterious collection of dead boats on the river intrigued me. In my imagination a catastrophic downturn in trade, or the coming of the railway or some other market crash led to the scrapping of the boats. There are lots of them and they make a melancholy sight which often chimed with my mood. Here are some more photos:

The real reason for this mas extinction event was that when the river broke its banks – as it often does – the destructive power and speed of the tide (the second highest tidal range in the world) threatened the integrity of the canal bank and by extension the canal itself. So these ships which included Severn trows, concrete and steel barges were towed to the spot and sunk in order to protect the canal. Some of the boats are now protected sites due to their age and rarity. My fascination with this stretch of the river never went away. There was more to it, though. My grandfather determined early on that I was going to read Dickens, and was always ready to lend me his own copies. Is it at all significant that the two favourite authors of my early reading life were HG Wells (hence the Potwell Inn) and Charles Dickens (hence the identification with Ham Peggotty, and upturned boats? These were the geographical heftings of my young imagination and so finding them in real life was a kind of homecoming. Magwitch, Peggotty and Polly haunted my dreams and still visit me now.

There’s so much more to write about the Severn and next time I’ll be remembering the last putcher and kype fishermen, ending a tradition that lasted from the 5th century, and elver omelettes of course along with a new and revelatory understanding of why the salmon developed lesions.

The Severn further upriver near Arlingham where you can see (and hear) the Severn Bore

Back in the kitchen honouring the rituals

Madame was once teased by her brother in law when she was in her pre-teens that her innards would turn yellow if she ate piccalilli. – the pickle which represents one of the dishes that came back with the soldiers and civil servants of colonial India (cf curry etc) and became a fully naturalised dish. It’s not to everyone’s taste of course, and it can be a bit fierce depending on how much mustard you include, but the combination of leftover veg from the season; diced cauliflower, little onions, beans, green tomatoes, carrots and courgettes bathed in a golden yellow sauce of cornflower, turmeric, mustard, sugar, honey and vinegar is a terrific way of using up the waifs and strays from the garden or the allotment.

The problem, every year, is that we haven’t quite finished last year’s. In fact we still cook as if the Potwell Inn has just been featured in the Guardian. We have a lot of stored food; probably more than the two of us will ever be able to finish up. The concomitant problem is that every year entails a frantic hunt for empty preserving jars and lids. The lids are important because the industrial acidity of pickles and chutneys can eat into them – so generally we use Kilner jars and renew the rubber rings, or the Italian Bormioli jars which have coated rust proof lids. Over the years we’ve amassed quite a collection of different sizes and every year we top up supplies of lids.

In the cupboard stores today we found masses of tomato sauces; passata; damson: plum; blackcurrant and redcurrant jams; bramble jelly; dower house chutney; green tomato chutney, and various experimental preserves involving figs; peppers; beetroot and anything else that manage to cling to a tree until the autumn. I think we might be channelling the grandparents and my mum, who, as the alzheimer’s took hold would go shopping and just come back with half a dozen tins of spaghetti hoops which had lodged in her failing memory. She was a fine cook in her day.

Live as if you might die tomorrow and farm as if you’ll live forever

Farming proverb.

Preserving is one of the great pleasures of autumn and early winter. Today Madame and I sat either side of the kitchen table chopping vegetables in companionable harmony. The deep winter feels less of a threat when the cupboards are full and the sheer pleasure of it led to a conversation about the allotment and whether we should keep it on after such a difficult season. The decision was reached in ten seconds (Yes!) and was followed by a discussion of the seed order and the decision to get a garden shredder to lessen the load of composting the waste. I think we’ve permanently turned our backs on bonfires to reduce our carbon footprint and so we’re going to spread the shredded waste as a mulch over as many beds as we can.

Retrospectively the season was desperately hard work, but come the end we grew a lot of food; picking the last crop of green tomatoes yesterday. I guess as we get older and creakier we can at least replace some of the manual labour with battery powered tools and raised beds. There’s one job that will have to wait for a day or two – Christmas cake and puddings.

Back home from Cornwall I was able to sort out the computer problem with the (eventual) help of a WordPress Happiness Engineer who just emailed and said “do this – 1,2,3”. Music to a non technical ear. We seemed to jump from summer to winter in the course of 175 miles although the heavy rain has cleared during the afternoon and the sun is shining. We’re due the first named storm of the season on Friday just in time to celebrate the Government’s batshit crazy decision to drill for gas which will do everything to damage the environment and nothing whatever to make life easier for us. The economy, is not the same as a mountain or a river it’s not an object it’s a concept; and whilst you can’t change the height of a mountain or the course of a river with clever arguments, you most certainly can change a concept by thinking clearly, formulating your aims and evaluating the best way of achieving them. If the earth is on fire, alternately with being underwater, we can decide what sort of world we would prefer to live in, formulate the best way of organising the economy to achieve it, and get on with it.

Crown Prince squashes and a couple of pumpkins – one for the grandchildren

Across a crowded pavement

Seaside Daisy

I really did meet someone who fell in love with someone they’d never met before, across a crowded room; or at least in that instance a crowded airport departure gate. The outcome was a bit messy so I won’t enlarge on the story any further. But is it, however, appropriate to use the expression in relation to a plant?  If love is redemptive, is it alright if the redemption looks back at a single pub lunch that was an unrelentingly miserable betrayal of cooking; the corpse of the idea lying dead in a shroud of soggy batter and a fish stew in a Cornish fishing village whose contents contained nothing but tasteless cornflower water and a handful of imported jumbo prawns. That is something that takes a bit of getting over. 

The god of surprises on the other hand must have had that redemptive moment in hand already as we walked back to the little park overlooking the bay. It won’t come as a shock to anyone who knows me, especially to Madame, that I’ve become a bit of a stalker in spite of all that I’ve written about trainspotter botanists recently. The Fleabanes are an attractive quarry precisely because they’re quite hard to identify. Some of them are regarded as weeds, but the upside is that some of them grow near us in Bath. I took a look in Stace IV (he who must be obeyed) and he lists thirteen species and subspecies, two of which grow in the pavement outside the flat and one in Charlie Stirton’s garden just down the road. The challenge is just that they have an inclination to cross-breed and unlike the ones that grow under supervision in a botanical garden, they rarely if ever show up in the same place and at the same time, and so it’s hard to get a detailed understanding of them. Of course there are a number of other Fleabanes that aren’t in the family I’m most interested in, so to be more precise I’m hunting the Erigerons – and that is the end of the Latin lesson. 

So I’ve found four members of the family within walking distance and there are a couple more slowly making their way up the river. But one I’ve never seen before is not often referred to as a fleabane because it’s commonly called the “Seaside Daisy”  and after my dyspeptic walk down the road from the pub – there it was! – growing and obviously naturalised alongside the narrow pavement. The pavement isn’t really that narrow but there are always builders vans and SUV’s which are too corpulent to fit their allotted spaces.  

Of course it immediately raises the issue about whether it’s a true native so to be clear: it’s not; it’s a boat plant you might say which – like most of the residents of the depleted local population – blew in from somewhere else like London or Birmingham. You know this because the local Spar shop sells sourdough bread and wines at £30.

Anyway, to return to the redemptive moment, the second I set eyes on it I knew exactly what it was – the photo is, as always, at the top. I can’t begin to express the pleasure of seeing that little outsider; outrider of a plant. A naturalized neophyte boldly asserting possession of a yard or so of someone’s garden.; someone who had the good taste to let it be. Somewhere down that little harbourside road there’s a gardener with vision, running a mission to those with eyes to see that even weeds and gnarly incomers have their beauty. I still haven’t forgiven the pub, but the takeaway memory of the day is of the seaside daisy; petals faintly purple like Michaelmas daisies, succulent salt resistant leaves in rosettes making the best of an Indian summer’s day overlooking the bay. Love at first sight. 

Back in Treloan Lane

You’ll notice the difference in formatting in this piece. Apologies, I’ll correct it when WordPress restores my access to my own site.

Our journey down here was a bit of a nightmare. It wasn’t just the usual kind of rain but a malignant blanket of fine drizzle that forced us to use the fastest wiper setting, which drummed back and forth like a pair of demented festival goers. In heavy rain even the landscape and the roadsigns disappear as lorries pass leaving con-trails of greasy spray and we passed our usual stopping place and drove towards the next which was on the northern side of Bodmin Moor. The moor is a moody place at the best of times but this time it wasn’t snow, sleet or driving rain, it was like driving through a ghostly white tunnel. When eventually we found a service station, filling the tank was a literally immersive experience, being battered by the horizontal drizzle blowing in sideways. Luckily I was wearing my favourite, moth eaten oiled Welsh Black woollen jumper which kept the worst of it out and I steamed dry in the car as we drove the last eighty miles. Our destination was a hay loft which we’d seen being converted for a couple of years and we rented it on a whim after a long season of hospital trips and building work. 

We’ve been walking down this lane for years; it’s one of four places whose plants I know pretty well. One and a half miles each way, it combines tarmac, grassy path and a small section of sunken track – but its composition; sunken for most of its length between high banks, hedges and Cornish banks has obviously evolved alongside its surrounding culture as fishing declined and farming rose and then tourism came along and insisted that the access to the holiday cottages did not jeopardize the paintwork of the family car. Normally at this point I’d insert the picture of flail-mower butchery that greeted us a few years ago but a hiccough in WordPress has got me locked out and you’re reading this via a circuitous workaround which can’t cope with photos; so that demanded a bit of  change in writing style as I try to say with words what I would otherwise have served up on a photographic plate. I had a cataract removed five weeks ago and once the swelling had cleared up and the double vision resolved, I found myself in a startlingly new world. I’ve mentioned this to other people who’ve had lens replacements and it seems we all experience an almost psychedelic period of colour and sharpness. Even Sainsbury’s car park looked amazing in the sunshine. I was captivated by the sharp edges of the cars. As soon as I was cleared to drive by the hospital we came here to a characteristically misty and rainy Cornwall for a bit of R&R.

It’s in the nature of sunken lanes that they provide a sheltered environment for all manner of plants, insects and animals. Here on the lane there are some of the richest hedgerows we’ve ever seen. My biggest problem for several years was that the cataract in my right, dominant, eye meant that I was unable to clearly resolve the things I was looking at. I’d pretty much decided that this was due to a faulty prescription, but it’s obvious now that a semi transparent film covering the lens was the real problem. Back here in Cornwall I was hoping that my greatly improved vision would allow me to see as well as the camera linked to a large screen hi-res monitor. Wow! Now, with the inspiration of improved eyesight and the opportunity presented by WordPress problems has prompted another big think …… how can I better express in words what I see as we walk slowly down the lane?

But there’s a catch here because I normally use carefully composed photographs which are rich in technical information that I can take to the identification guides without exposing the complexities of the process. It’s a hidden scientific process based on data and measurements and precise observations – all as boring as a bad preacher on a rainy Sunday to the average reader because the photo doesn’t need to brag about its contents But the writer’s tools are very different; bafflingly metaphorical to a scientist; woolly and suggestive rather than descriptive. You get the picture I hope. We’re dealing with two different languages and cultures, like trying to describe love in a spreadsheet populated only by temperatures and breathing rates. 

So back to the lane where we stopped to admire a cone from a felled Monterey Pine, covered in foliose lichen, the living expression of a fibonacci spiral but not designed by a mathematician but rather circumstance and evolution. A little further up the lane the hedge is covered with Old Man’s Beard, now covering the hedge with a snowlike cloak. But stepping forwards from the path to take a much closer look, you can see the stunningly beautiful mop-heads of seeds whose feathery tops curl like punk hairstyles waiting for the wind to call them away to service somewhere else. Below them in the hedge a brave few Red Campions risk a flower; pale pink after a hard season. Ivy berries, terrific food for the birds and the bees are clinging like tiny green and black mustard pots to their vines. A little clump of Babington’s Leeks is still, just about surviving atop one of the Cornish hedges. They’re quite unusual and we were pleased to see them a couple of years ago. By this time we would have expected the bulbs to open up exposing the bulbils which grow shoots before dropping to the ground, This time they are dried up by the summer heat and drought. This little patch will probably die off unrecorded. As we stroll further down we see evidence of the first of the carrot family to appear in spring. Large green rosettes (and some with stems and leaves) are the promise of next year’s Alexanders. Later, returning up the lane we find some seedheads hanging on. They’re easy to identify because Alexanders, AKA Herb Gerard, is the only member of the family with black seeds. There’s Mugwort  growing along the length of the path – once used in brewing beer – hence the name – still in flower. Near the beach there are wild radishes and also sea radishes. Their leaves differ slightly, the sea radish has slightly thickened shiny and tougher leaves, like its neighbour the Sea Beet, but both have magnificent basal rosettes and slightly different numbers of seeds in their pods. Unfortunately for the purists they hybridize together freely – like the wild carrots – and it’s sometimes impossible to be sure which one you’ve found. Returning up the path after an ice cream we see an abundance of Winter Heliotrope which will flood the path with its peculiar almond scent in just a few weeks around Christmas. We see the beginnings of the Yarrow and the end of the Charlock; tall, crisp and dead against the sky and finally an exciting little find right at the bottom of the cornish hedge, with the stones catching the last heat of the sun – a small clump of Wood Calamint.

Did I say how much I love this place?

“Sir, I’ve lost me daps!”

This is a very rare photograph of Father Christmas’s footprints exiting the chimney about 14 years ago. You’ll also see how tired he must have been because he left the reindeer’s carrot behind although he drank the glass of wine and left a thank-you note on borrowed paper. What you probably won’t know unless you come from Gloucestershire, Bristol, North Somerset or South Wales is that he was wearing daps (you can tell by the shape of the prints) because – so my Dad told me years ago – he didn’t want to wake anyone up. Unless you come from one of those related areas you’ll have no idea what daps are in any case; they’re what posh people call plimsolls, thereby setting themselves apart from us. We are also almost the last redoubt of the glottal stop although we have no idea when the rest of the world lost it. It’s hard to learn but a decent speech therapist might (I mean might ) teach to to say bu’er instead of butter (the apostrophe is where you close your larynx and grunt against your vocal cords. On the Bristol edge of Gloucestershire we despise all words ending in “a” and substitute “l” for instance in Africal. He becomes ‘ee- the differences are minute but unmistakable. We use the words “gert” (big) and “lush” (nice) but never together as outsiders tend to do when they try to get alongside us. When it comes to the letter “r” the problem is not so much learning it, but for a local to say anything with an “r” in it without letting their true identity slip. It’s a well set snare for the Gloucestershire social climber. Lessons (in a small way) are available on the 39x bus to Bristol from Bath led by a recorded announcer who even manages to work a tiny glottal stop into Arno’s Court (as it appears in the timetable) but she says “Arnel’s Cor’t” adding the “t” as an afterthought to the minute g/s. I love her dearly and I would appreciate it if, next birthday, she would read me a bedtime story and make me feel young again. the Gloucestershire dialect is broad and generous, we even – and this is an absolute collector’s piece – have the soft mutation where the “t” in tram becomes “d” as in dram. A hangover from our surprisingly recent coal mining past.

This, of course is about the aftershocks of the cultural penny banger which followed my accidental lapse when speaking to a dog. In that piece – which is linked back above – I was puzzling on the extent to which my identity (most people’ identity) is tied up in language. I was born and brought up in Gloucestershire although the Local authorities conspired to move it into the Greater Bristol postcode, then Avon, and finally South Gloucestershire where it remains. So three different addresses without moving a yard. We who knew what daps were – and how to fox the PE teacher into letting you off games – were a people apart.

So what’s that all about? Well, a voice is a kind of signature; the signature of a local culture now barely audible except to eccentric wordsmiths like me. I don’t need reminding that AI can easily take my voice and get it to say unspeakable things; but if anyone who knew me heard me speaking that way they’d know it wasn’t me. I have a second password, and that’s my punctuation. You will notice that it’s really weird. Who uses so many hyphens, semi colons and far too many commas in writing? The semi colon is banned by every style guide except – I read somewhere – the Church Times. But through years of writing for radio slots, sermons and talks, punctuation has become the structure that glues the written content together. The punctuation manages the pace, the pauses and silences of my work so I can (as they used to say) “lift them off the page”.

At the top of each piece it says – “The Potwell Inn” a sort of anonymising conceit. Then if you hunt about a bit you’ll discover that this is written by someone who calls himself Dave Pole – but where’s the evidence? The evidence is in the voice, silly. It’s the one guarantee that this is written by me because it’s verifiable by anyone who’s heard me speak. This is by no means always a pleasure. I was once wandering around the supermarket chatting to people here and there when I was accosted by a women who said “are you Dave Pole?” Thinking she must have heard me on the radio I tried not to look too pleased that she’d recognized my voice. But she just said rather disappointedly – “Oh, I thought you were tall”.

I am not tall. I am short, old now, a bit fat and contain no silicone anywhere about my person so I wouldn’t feel confident enough to expose myself in visual form (yet). Video is a bit of a faff in any case, but the equipment I use for audio hardly weighs anything and sits on my desk next to the laptop which is very clever and frees me from the hard earned skill of cutting and joining bits of reel to reel tape together with a cutting block, razor blade and some special editing sticky tape.

So a slow move towards including a bit more audio in the Potwell Inn posts feels like a no-brainer. I started researching the kit I’d need in April, and it’s all sitting in front of me now. However, like the story of the Zen archer forgetting what a bow is, I can’t really start producing audio properly until I’ve stopped worrying about the kit and concentrate entirely on the words. But I’m as optimistic and excited as I was when I discovered clay – and Madame of course!.

For now it’s practice, practice , Practice while the Potwell Inn will meander on just the same like the river across the green but hopefully with less crap in it. .

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with a dog.

Well it wasn’t quite a conversation. I was holding a gate open for Madame when a dog – it was a Springer spaniel – rushed past me nose down, hoovering up a scent line as they do, head low and moving from side to side, tail held almost straight out in a don’t bother me, I’m busy – sort of fashion. I could see its owners about 30 yards back on the track and I said to the dog “Hello you”. The dog being otherwise engaged barely paused to look at me and stopped his forward dash, turned on a sixpence and ran back to his owners. I walked on with Madame and, maybe thirty yards later, a light went on in my head and I realized I’d not only spoken to the dog but I’d spoken in dialect. I was so taken by this slip (I’ve had many decades of practice at not slipping into dialect and I think it was because I was talking to a dog. “You” – used as a pronoun in Gloucestershire used to be confined to strangers and could be construed as faintly hostile. I worked as a labourer in an engineering company when I was about seventeen; after leaving school unceremoniously accompanied by the Headmaster who had me by the shirt collar. This company was in the process of moving from farm buildings to sheet metalworking and chemical engineering and highly skilled (coded) welders were worth their weight in gold. Twin brothers were the welding superstars; they’d both worked on pressure vessels in nuclear power stations and they were so indispensable to the company that they freely abused the managers with the most foul insults. I learned a great deal from them. Anyway, to get back to the point, they never addressed me as anything other than “you”. They would invariably greet me with a surly “alright you?” which absolutely did not require an answer.

But why the sudden “you”? was it because it still lives there unused in my everyday conversations? the bedrock language of my locality. It still seems very precious to me. When I go to the local sawmill to buy posts for the allotment, all the people on the counter speak like me – not like my dad who was Bristolian, or my mum who came from deepest Oxfordshire – but like the language of my childhood’ the language that A F Woodman our Music teacher would try to din out of us. “Boughten” was one of his pet hates. “Thee” and “thou” still had some lingering currency among our elders. When I hear it echoed today it moves me, makes me feel at home, because in its dropped aitches and extended aar sounds, in its you’s and thee’s and its overall timbre and slow pace it gives me a place, a location. Without a local accent of some kind, words are like bus stops without a grid reference – meaningless until you know where to find them. The minute particulars of pronunciation function like tags; they signal important information about the speaker and their message to any listeners who are attuned to the patterns. The last person I knew who spoke full Gloucestershire was Lenny Clark, a fine gardener who died a few years ago. The difference between you and thee , like the French tu and vous are important indicators of relationship and we’ve let them go, although the now redundant differences in speech still express the same divisions in society. Some like to imagine that people who cling to local speech patterns are slow witted and stupid. I think that those people who speak like politicians without giving any clue where they come from, and what background, what hinterland they have – are the true citizens of nowhere. When they appear on the national news I make tea because the voice of authority hides behind received pronunciation – it’s disembodied, bloodless. I don’t suppose there’s much trace of Gloucestershire in my voice these days but that’s where I come from.

There are two bits of data you need to plan any journey on a map. Firstly you need to know where North is but crucially you need to know exactly where you are, where the starting point is on the map. If a harbour is the place a hero sets out from, not knowing where you belong, where you’re starting from, means you’re lost as soon as you sail over the horizon.

I used to walk with a retired farmhand on the banks of the river Severn, and one day he amazed me by naming, with their local names, the fields almost a mile away on the far side of the river. When I speak, I speak with the ghostly voices of my dad, a railwayman; my mother, a dressmaker; my grandfather, a carpenter and smallholder; and all the people I’ve known – not least the already mentioned A F Woodman who taught me to love music, and Chris Levinson who introduced me to the Beat Poets. I went to a so-called technical school but listened to the voice of Chaucer read in its rich original dialect by another English teacher, and learned French from a teacher who seemed to have spent the war in France. There’s a lot of freight in a voice if you care to honour it, and none at all in the aetiolated speech of those who’ve left their history in the dustbin. Losing thee means we have no way of signalling a whole stage of human connection.

This is not in any sense an appeal to return to a kind of local tribalism but to escape the awful snobbery of the tribe which most often causes the trouble and whose dialect history has been brushed away by many coats of magnolia so they can advance in their social class. A truly diverse society wouldn’t insist on young people airbrushing their local dialects out of existence. We can all learn to hear each other. I barely speak a word of Welsh but even I can hear in a sentence or two whether the speaker is from North or South Wales , or Pembrokeshire, or somewhere in the borders west of the Severn, or from the Valleys where I once worked for a while running worker-writers’ workshops.

I called the dog “you” instinctively because we didn’t know one another. The dog, possibly understanding the nuance scooted back to its owner. I think that’s quite wonderful – how about thee?

The River Severn at Purton

The imagination doesn’t work with footnotes

We think – more of an informed guess, really, that this is an Arkansas Black apple tree. Very small but highly perfumed fruits.

In his famous 1961 book Weeds & Aliens Sir Edward Salisbury (1886–1978), an eminent British ecologist and a former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, described an informal experiment after returning home from a walk through the countryside. He noticed that the turn-ups of his woollen trousers were full of mud and burrs.

Instead of brushing the debris away, he scraped out the dirt from his trouser cuffs and planted it. Salisbury was surprised when the tiny amount of soil yielded over 300 individual plants representing more than 20 different species.

  • The answer to my question “who was it” – an AI question on Google Gemini

I thought I’d better own up to that bit of AI because it seems that some saddos enjoy knocking down writers because they’ve sailed too close to someone else’s writing. It seems that for that kind of tiny mind, every semicolon needs to be the sole unaided work of a single creative mind. Give me a break! the logosphere is one huge whirlpool of language forged and forgotten over millennia. I’ve been reading Alice Oswald’s new book “Rhapsody – a manifesto” and you would probably love it as much as me if you’re sick of the tired old clichés about solitary bohemians and geniuses and their entourages of critics, editors, gallerists and curators.

So I picked that story about Sir Edward Sainsbury’s trouser bottoms because it’s such a good illustration of the way in which creative minds really work. I go for a walk on the allotment with my mind open and alert while my metaphorical turn-ups fill with seeds for new posts. My botanical mind asks “who, what, where and when” but my creative mind asks “why”. Why has this Peruvian Apple landed on our plot and how did it get here? What does it mean? what’s it for?

We have robins which just love it when we break open the soil and expose grubs for them to feed their families. They’re very tame, and come to our feet unafraid even singing their minor key songs to us. Yes they’re highly territorial -we once had to evict a couple of fighting males from the fruit cage before they really damaged one another. There are many other birds on the allotment site and I speak to them all and clap my hands to scare off the pigeons from our cabbages. Occasionally a magpie will attempt to rag a nest nearby and the sky is full of spite and venom and alarm calls. One day I saw something moving in a hedge and I stopped to look closer. After a while a wren cautiously came to the edge and immediately hurried back into the shelter. I was taken aback by my unexpected love for it. I stop and consider that word, “love” – but enjoy; like; admire, don’t come close in intensity. It seems to me that most of those relationship terms demand reciprocation but it didn’t matter that my burst of love for the wren needed no response or even recognition on its part

Apples, on the other hand are a bit difficult because they’re so hard to give names to. Madame’s old boss, George Gilbert, could name the variety with ease – he’d lived and breathed them for a lifetime. For us, it means long searches in databases and through books written fifty or more years ago. The apple at the top was – we were told – a French variety called L’Abri Noir. We were never convinced, especially when I discovered that “abri” could be used for a carport. The romance rather drained out of that one . It was Belgian in any case. But the American Arkansas Black is a closer fit – and now we know its likely name it’s easier to treasure.

Apple trees have a distinctive shape. You wouldn’t think this could conceivably be contentious but I once had a bit of a row with a lecturer who scoffed at any thought that they had a distinctive form and rejected my black and white painting in house paint on a piece of cardboard. But he was wrong. There’s a distinctive downward curve in the branches that could be caused by the weight of apples season by season, or might be a genetically determined feature. Whatever the cause, it’s easy to pick out an apple tree by its shape – and a world in which creatures and plants are known and loved by name is a better place.

All of which comes back to Sir Edward Sainsbury’s trouser turn-ups. Of course we can take a walk; enjoy the sunshine and breathe the fresh air, return home and think”that was nice”. But a walk with the senses screwed up to eleven never returns home empty handed. Half the fun of writing a blog like this is opening the box of remembered treasures and stringing them together into some form of story. Narrative; the spinning of yarns, poems, songs, prayers and laments is fundamental to our humanity. Overheard remarks, captured glances, rich gossip, all contribute to our sense of who we are and occasionally comfort and hold us safe in times of crisis

The point of all this is that the creative imagination doesn’t work with rules, templates and footnotes. The creative mind is shamelessly jackdaw-ish. Always happy to take someone else’s insight and work it into something new. I always try my best to give credit to the originator of a borrowed phrase or idea, but sometimes they just come out of the flow. I’m pretty sure that some of my pieces have taken on a second existence on someone else’s site and I know for sure that the entire million plus words and thousand plus postings have been scraped into the large language AI models. It would be nice to have some acknowledgement as a source but I’d love it if it was shared with a credit and link to the Potwell Inn.

.

I suddenly realized that this tree could be Granny Perrin’s Nest.

Looking out of the bedroom window yesterday morning I had a small scale revelation; nothing huge but more of a bicycle tyre lever, gently easing an old memory off the rim in search of a leak. There’s a tall tree, a couple of roads north of the flat, and which rises above the roof line. I’ve no idea what species it is; it could be a Lombardy poplar – but without ever hauling it into consciousness I’ve been using it for years as a weather forecaster. There’s a companion met office rival a bit further away; the church clock on Julian Road which you can only hear chiming in a northeasterly wind. But yesterday, and returning to the tree, I could see it being bent by a gusty southwesterly wind – and that simple observation is the gateway to a great deal of useful information to a gardener. In itself that’s a mundane thought but a moment later the phrase “Granny Perrin’s nest” popped into my mind and my memory dropped into time travel mode.

Granny Perrin’s nest is an expression my Mum used to use when my sister and I stayed in our grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns. Mum would look up at some unfathomable point in the sky and say – “there’s rain over Granny Perrin’s nest”. As a child with a seedling poetic imagination it was a phrase of great beauty; pregnant with incomprehensible meaning but clearly something I would need to understand if I was ever going to be a grown-up. Yesterday I looked it up on Google Gemini just in case – in my eightieth year – it might finally crack the code and print the admission ticket.

I was completely taken aback by the result. This is a phrase that I’ve mentioned a number of times in this blog, and – here and there – I’ve mentioned childhood memories of The Crest – the cottage my grandfather built and the smallholding where I learned about nineteenth century farming at first hand. As I looked at the computer screen every word I’ve ever written about it had been scraped and stored by AI and, far more troubling, augmented by some local information and kneaded into a narrative with a completely spurious authority. My childhood memories refined and curated by a machine and spewed out as facts. I felt a bit violated to be honest; as if the AI had forensically scraped my childhood off the pavement and reconstructed an unwise night out at the pub. All the bits were there but they weren’t me. No lights lit up. I would never have joined those dots in the way that the machine did because there was none of the fuzzy logic of the mind. My Mum was missing; my grandfather with his unbuttoned shirt and jacket full of burn holes from the roll-ups that lived in the corner of his mouth; my Granny sweating and cursing over the paraffin stove; the chickens, Charlie the toad in the greenhouse. I suppose I should give credit to the suggestion that Granny Perrin’s nest referred to a tall elm, and support for my memory that there were still a few red squirrels but none of these were my memories. I only remember the grey squirrels which my grandfather would knock out of trees with a weighted stick so he could claim a bounty on the tails. I dread to think that some innocent enquirer might, one day, unleash these curated memories as if they were facts.

Is there a conclusion to be drawn? We worry about the power of AI but it seemed to me that it’s not behaving like an organised crime syndicate (at least at the information gathering level) but as a kleptomaniac or shoplifter criminally entering my mind and indiscriminately shoving everything into a bag marked swag, to be sold on in the dark web of plausible untruths.

Granny Perrin’s nest is, and always was a metaphor. My mum never for a moment thought that there was a real nest up there at the top of the tree, with an elderly lady living in it, issuing weather forecasts. It was a piece of folklore with a useful predictive truth about weather. The world of story and song is full of these instances and they can travel, even as far as a city like Bath so that I can listen out for the church bell which always brings cold winds, or the bending of the tree which tells me about atlantic weather approaching.

The great elm trees would have been used by the bodgers in the nearby woods who made the most wonderful Windsor chairs and other fancies using elm, which doesn’t split, for the seats and beech or some other locally available timber for the other parts. We would often walk through the woods to Margaret’s beer shop as our parents delicately named it, and eat crisps and drink cherryade. My grandfather was a carpenter whose family had lived in the same village since the 18th century. He made us rainbows with a stirrup pump and a bucket of water. My Granny was a cockney, brought up within earshot of the Bow Bells as an orphan. We never knew how she was brought up and cared for. Layer after layer of meaning that resonates for me, reduced to a handful of gradgrindian facts by heartless machine learning. And yet I often come across myself in some more or less caricatured form on the internet. My God I’ve lived an interesting life, I think as Madame and I lie in bed holding hands and dreaming. Our mother loved her plants and she would never visit a garden without indulging in a bit of harmless larceny; these memories gather around me like an incandescent ball of fireflies; immune to capture. Let’s not call it intelligence any more – it’s not spreadsheet knowledge it’s more of an address book for locked rooms which no AI agent will ever be able to enter. No one reading them off a screen in the future will be able fully to enter their world. All it will tell is where you might begin to look for your own story.

I’m wondering if it’s me that’s heritage!

Is it me? I wonder, as I sit here surrounded by cables and what the tech industry chooses to call “heritage” equipment. A few weeks ago I was involved in contributing to a podcast on Zoom and had a few anxious moments when I discovered that the camera on my laptop was broken and the tablet I brought in as reserve refused to play. In the end I did it with my phone and it was fine; but it left me with a gnawing sense that I should sort it out. First stop was to enquire about mending the laptop, but it turned out that it would cost £180 just to take the screen off. Meanwhile my room is filled with a collection of old and new cameras – all capable of video – indeed my friend Phil Peel has made whole films on his Panasonic GH2 in the past. The video quality would be miles better than a cheap webcam and I’ve already got a radio mic so being a thrifty kind of person I dropped into a rabbit hole of competing and conflicting standards in search of a way to join the dots and build a recycled webcam setup.

I quickly discovered that my box of carefully curated bits and bobs was full of kit that fought like rats in a sack. This was – I learned- due to problems with “handshake”. The IT malarkey is a very vocabulary extending business. I also fought my way through multitudes of standards, connectors and Papal encyclicals while I began to run up a hefty connector bill with Amazon. It would have been easier to understand if everyone else wasn’t speaking Greek while I was speaking Latin but a week’s onscreen work, with my eyes very sore from a cataract operation, produced something like the Nicene Creed which only worked then because absolutely no-one understood it and I – like a blind man given a Rubik’s Cube – fiddled about randomly changing around the plugs from my growing collection until sulk by sulk the camera talked to the laptop; the hub found the sound and by a miracle it all found its way across the wild waves to the front room where Madame was waiting patiently for my ghostly face to appear, connected to a voice. Most of the previous hour we’d just been shouting to each other across the corridor.

Thrift is hard work. Another old friend, Harry Griffiths gave a wonderfully funny off the cuff speech at his 90th birthday when he finished a long excursus on apple trees and thrift by saying that the trouble with eating up the windfalls all the time was that you never got to eat a decent apple. The fact is, I’m not that interested in the IT at all. I begrudge the amount of time I spend learning new skills and new programmes because what I really want to do is get on with writing. The thrift is an ethical stance against premature obsolescence and waste. One of the main reasons I kicked the Apple (computers) habit was because I couldn’t stand the way that a 14 year old counter assistant curled his lip at me and said I should get a newer model when all it needed was a battery.

But now I’m almost there; just one new ‘Dp’ cable away from having to unplug and replug the old HDMI lead every time the laptop shuts itself down- so last year! – and then I can carry on experimenting with adding some video to the Potwell Inn feed. The biggest obstacle is getting the technicals under my belt to the point where I don’t even think about them. I’m used to “getting the script off the page” on the radio and I’ve got years of microphone technique under my belt. I once helped out with a recording of the Bible when – for a very small fee – I played the devil; typecast as always. They told me it went down a storm in Africa where they loved my accent. I had no idea that the devil came from Gloucestershire.

My biggest worry is that my readers will hate my voice and recoil from my weathered and ancient looks and frankly wild hair and turn to more sculpted and siliconised bloggers, but I cling to Samuel Beckett’s wise words –“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. Meanwhile I need to tidy up the clutter on my desk and ring the garage yet again. The campervan, having failed its MOT, is still baffling the experts with its record breaking emissions. Meanwhile here’s a nice picture of what my phone tells me is Ceylon spinach – growing in our neighbour’s polytunnel. Oh what a tangled web ….. etc. Then I’ve added some cautionary photos of leads in boxes. It should keep you awake. It did me!!