Category: About the Potwell Inn

Anyone can do this!

Stone Parsley leaves

As I was closing the lid on the laptop after writing about a bit of botanising in White Field yesterday I thought something along the lines of – “is it discouraging to someone interested in nature for me to write in a way that makes me sound much cleverer than I really am?”

The thing is, I’m a relative beginner and when I go out on field trips with very knowledgeable guides, I sometimes come home feeling a bit stupid. I was leading a field trip myself a few weeks ago and before we set out I read aloud half a page from a book I was reading which expressed exactly that sentiment in the hope that in such a mixed ability group we could look out for one another and try not to be patronising towards less skilled newcomers. I was, of course, thinking about my own experiences. However it was not to be and the propeller heads in the group all shot off trailing latin names behind them like condensation trails in the sky. You could see the hope die in the eyes of some of the others.

There’s no shame in not knowing a Latin name, or what tetraploidy means – they’re just steps on a road that leads to deeper understanding and far more fun. Some leaders are good teachers and some aren’t and if you think back to your biggest and most important learning experiences they usually began with someone taking your puzzled question seriously and helping you – as it were – through the hedge. On our very first field trip the leader took me in hand and began naming some very ordinary and common plants, knowing – as good teachers always do – that a willing learner will store that knowledge joyfully and never need to ask again. One of those plants was Nipplewort – and I was struck by the fact that the flower wasn’t as much like a human nipple but a grease nipple of the kind that used to lubricate old steam engines. In that short conversation I absorbed something of what birders call the jizz of the plant and now when I pass it on a walk I name it silently in my head and think to myself “Nipplewort; Lapsana communis” – in a form of greeting to an old friend. If I should be out walking with our grandchildren I’d do the same thing out loud. It could be the first step in a consuming interest. When, last autumn, we were out with them in Dyrham Park we passed some Spindle Trees I talked about the use of the wood in making spindles. What I didn’t know until very recently was that spindles were more likely to be pegs or skewers or – in Gloucestershire – skivers! Being more of a wordsmith than a taxonomist it’s often the local names that excite me as much as the strict accuracy of the scientist.

Anyway, the allotment takes up most of our time in the summer – here’s another photo I took today and I hope you’ll agree that it’s a very pretty mess.

Our wild Fennel plants. Madame wishes they were Dill but they love where they are and all our attempts at growing Dill seem to fail.

We went messy a couple of years ago in the hope of increasing our insect population. We dug a pond, stopped obsessively clearing the ground and continued never using any chemicals. The weeds said thank you very much and duly populated any square inches of bare soil – just the way nature intended it to be. About four years ago I found a rather bothersome weed with very pretty purple and white flowers colonising one of our beds. After a struggle and with the help of the national referee we finally found the name and it turned out to be rather rare in our district in spite of its name “Tall Ramping Fumitory” but a rare subspecies in this country – Fumaria bastardii ssp. hibernica – better known in Ireland. How lovely to have a rare plant growing wild on the allotment.

Then today, I was locking up the shed and I spotted something else – although this time I knew its name because I’d been shown it before by a competent botanist, growing close by..

So this is Stone Parsley – Sison amomum – another unusual plant taking advantage of our relaxed, not to say libertarian regime. I took some photos and when we got home I hit the databases and field guides and confirmed the identification – at least to my own satisfaction – it’ll have to be approved by a referee before it gets into the big database.

So to get back to where I kicked off, absolutely none of this demanded a degree level qualification or anything like it. Just a curious mind, a bit of tenacity and a willingness to ignore any snotty remarks from fellow allotmenteers about how untidy we are. I do this purely for pleasure and I have no interest in impressing anyone. When I was regularly on BBC Radio 2, I was in the supermarket chatting to a friend and a woman came around the corner and said to me “are you Dave Pole?”. “Yes I am”, I replied. She looked at me quizzically and then said “Oh. I thought you were tall”.

Being annoying isn’t just a personality trait – it’s a vocation!

Yesterday’s food from the allotment

City centre life is something of a competition between optimism and pessimism much of the time. Even in this impossible summer season the vegetables still grow and ripen; our best ever crop of Alderman peas – they grow vigorously to six feet and more and this year, for unknown reasons, we’ve escaped the usual infestation of pea moth. The pods are full of large, sweet, delicious peas of a quality that make you wonder if the frozen supermarket peas are even the same vegetable. The polytunnel tomatoes (Crimson Crush) are their usual vigorous and blight resistant selves, in fact the maincrop potatoes (Sarpo Mira) are also blight resistant and so we haven’t seen the ruination of the whole crop since we started growing them. We’re holding our nerve this year and growing all our sweetcorn in the tunnel – last year I transplanted them outside when they were 2′ tall and they too gave us a lovely crop because the badgers, squirrels and rats left them alone. The courgettes still try and rampage all over the allotment, but we’re ruthless with them. The only surprise is that pollintions have been generally good notwithstanding the desperate shortage of pollinators. We can’t claim any credit for the blackberries aside from training them along the boundary fence to deter night-time visitors. Unlike most garden cultivars the fruits taste great but the thorns are long and sharp enough to snag a rhinoceros.

That’s all on the plus side, but more negatively we have to cope with the usual inner city challenges thick and humid air; of night time overflights to Bristol Airport; constant ambulances and police cars driving past with warning sirens blasting; juvenile seagulls – temporarily grounded by their inability to fly back to their nests screeching for food from 4.00am, kitchen waste strewn across the pavements by urban gulls and foxes, noisy hen parties in the airBnb opposite with occasional glimpses of male strippers doing their thing, and then the ubiquitous semi conscious junkies, dealers, drunks and out of control dogs crapping unobserved by their owners who make sure they’re deeply absorbed by important business on the mobile rather than doggy business on the grass. Then, yesterday afternoon a squadron of jackhammers, bulldozers and heavy lorries started breaking up the foundations of the old Homebase site ready for another completely unnecessary block of overpriced and under spec flats. Promises to build doctors surgeries, primary schools and community facilities alongside low cost housing will be broken as always with the payment of a small fine to the local authority. The snagging for the redevelopment opposite has continued for years with missing damp courses, missing fire safety precautions, crumbling lintels, lime green slime mould on the faux Bath Stone walls, windows improperly installed or not fixed at all, and, (following a conversation today with a very upset owner) meaningless insurance. He couldn’t talk about it because it just made him emotional and depressed. Any word of protest will result in angry responses from landlords and Airbnb owners who would prefer you not to know that this is not quite the Paradise Regained promised by the publicity. Naturally, for a student of life like me, it’s a marvellous field for research and we wouldn’t want to live anywhere else! The weeds are fabulous.

My interest in Geoffrey Grigson (The Englishman’s Flora) has continued and I wanted to find out why exactly he’d managed to fall out with quite so many people. As someone who has regularly been told that I’m the rudest person they’ve ever met I thought he might have something I could learn to improve my technique. However it seems we are simply inveterate bubble poppers and can’t help ourselves when we’re confronted by mediocrity and dishonesty. His collected newspaper reviews* are tough going – far too prolix and dripping with anger aimed at other writers who are now (decades later) absolutely unknown – so they seem like a drastic waste of emotional energy. Far better to go for a walk and try to identify that tall Dandelion looking thing on the pavement outside. Most of the spanners, fruitcakes and halfwits will lose their reputations purely through the attrition of time. I’m aiming to disappear long before I’m dead, but the prospect of cluttering up the memory of a computer in the middle of the Mojave Desert with the Potwell Inn blog for all eternity amuses me, as I shall be asleep under a rock in a troutstream somewhere having completed my million words.

But hey, The Englishman’s Flora in spite of it’s Grandiose “The” in the title, rather than a more modest “An”; and its inappropriately sexist attitude to non male botanists is a really interesting and useful book that attempts (against all the odds) to unite the great ship of field botany with the other great ships of folk medicine, regional and local names and even witchcraft; all of which are heading off in different directions. It’s a book that hasn’t yet fallen for the daft idea that the pruinose texture of a Sloe in the autumn can be completely or even adequately described by a DNA string. Who’d have thought that there’s a member of the Stonecrop family called “Roseroot” which lives high in the mountains and whose roots smell of – obviously roses. Who’d have guessed that the odd looking Pineapple Weed, which lives in farm gateways where it’s guaranteed a regular hammering, actually smells just like a pineapple when you squeeze its flowerhead. For me this is not at all evidence of the hand of God, but of the awe inspiring, wasteful and aesthetically dazzling creativity of evolving nature.

  • Geoffrey Grigson – “The Contrary View” 1974

The stream of consciousness – a creative affliction.

Whitchurch Common, Dartmoor. March 2016

I said to Madame yesterday while we were walking through Bath – “I think I’m living in the 1940’s and 50’s”. She, being an avid reader of history and biographies, knew exactly what I was saying. She’s presently finishing the last of C J Sansom’s Shardlake novels and living in the Tudor period. Not having to explain things is one of the great blessings of our long relationship. Of course the imagination can play tricks and too lax an attitude towards truth telling could lead all the way to prison or even to 10 Downing Street; but in the manner of a psychoanalytic session – by allowing the mind to range freely and without comment, connections of the utmost significance can be forged.

So, if you’re a Potwell Inn regular you’ll know I’ve been thinking about and researching Geoffrey Grigson – author of “An Englishman’s Flora” and husband of Jane Grigson the great food writer. Chains of thought often take us on a journey and in this case it involved reconnecting with the village above By Brook where we lived for two and a half years while we were at art school; and a hairy drive over to Slaughterford in search of a pub that was actually one village further upstream on the little trout river which runs for around twenty miles between Castle Combe and the Avon at Bathampton . In the course of our day and in subsequent reading we discovered that Slaughterford is probably not the site of a famous battle between Alfred the Great and a small army of Danish raiders. and that the name probably derives from the Anglo Saxon term for the crossing near the place where the Blackthorns grow.

But this turned out to be much more than an antiquarian story. Immersing ourselves in a landscape in which we’d lived the early years of our relationship stirred up the strata of many memories. The melodious sound of the small river, for instance became the river that runs through the Potwell Inn garden in HG Wells’ novel – “A History of Mr Polly” as well as being the real place where we’d attempted unsuccessfully to poach brown trout and where I’d spent days drawing a tangle of tree roots. Being an artist or a writer seems to involve a huge struggle to lay hold of something significant. That laying hold rarely seems to work and we are left empty handed. The poet RS Thomas brilliantly describes it as being like placing your hand in the warmth of a hare form which a hare has recently fled. The creative life is full of almost and not quite.

Standing next to the river, memories resurfaced of moments in galleries and museums when suddenly, as if a flare has gone off in the mind, you can see clearly for the first time. Once, unexpectedly bursting into tears in front of a Renoir painting I’d only ever seen poorly reproduced less than the size of a postcard. Being young, passionate and raw the memories never leave you. The paintings that had given us a whole expressive language floated through my head and so in a wild yomp through the unconscious I remembered John Minton and, the imagination being capable of leaping over impossible fences, suddenly brought a roomful of associations – Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, MFK Fisher, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Davidson; who would all have known one another. Geoffrey Grigson would probably not have figured in too many Christmas card lists having been rude to, or about, so many people.

I’ve got a proof/review copy of Francis Spalding’s biography of John Minton “Dance ’til the stars come down” * which I bought quite cheaply because I couldn’t afford the original. It has no illustrations but in searching the secondhand booksellers today the book came up with his familiar self-portrait on the cover. Completely unexpectedly I almost welled up with grief as I recalled his melancholia, alcoholism and eventual suicide. A man I never met evoked a sense of loss that took me completely by surprise and the terrible thought came to me that this, perhaps, was the beginning of the end. The moment when the dark forces of conservatism began their fight back against post-war optimism and freedom. Since then they’ve synthesised joy and sold it back to us by subscription – one trivial experience at a time. We seem to have lost touch with the ordinary, everyday moments that used to make us dance ’till the stars came down. Art’s now a business, patrolled by curators and gallerists, and art schools run courses on keeping accounts, tax returns, building a website, networking effectively and staying in touch with the fashion of the moment.

I’m filled with the need to go and sit quietly on the bank next to the river once more to listen to what the spirits of the place still have to say to me. They, at least, have not been silenced by the self appointed magistrates of taste!

Postscript

The title of the Minton biography is a borrowing from W H Auden’s poem, which is itself a representation of the medieval “Danse Macabre” and equally a working of Stravinsky’s 1910 Firebird. The idea was very much in the air and was echoed in all sorts of media, not least in Bernard Leach’s rediscovery of 17th century English slipware. I’m thinking of the pelican in her piety. With two world wars in mind, there’s less hope in Auden’s poem – “not to be born is best for man”. A kind of mad defiance in the face of an overwhelming threat is his prescription.

Dance, dance for the figure is easy,
    The tune is catching and will not stop;
    Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
    Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

W H Auden – Death’s Echo

Bloodstained Juggling with six balls

By Brook seen from the lawn of the White Hart in Ford

I’m wrestling with half a dozen recalcitrant strands of an idea that just might make a story. Of course it might also just make a WTF? mess – only time and a patient reader will tell.

So the first strand is this. I mentioned last week in The Potwell Inn blog that my copy of Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellously useful book “An Englishman’s Flora” is falling apart and I’d have to buy another copy. My clapped out paperback is a 1975 reprint of the original hardback published in 1958 and the pages are now turning brown and are foxed. The glue binding is breaking down and it’s just at the point where the pages start dropping out. I bought it for next to nothing in an Oxfam shop and I see that the cover price was less than £2 when it was new. Anyway, prompted by my resolution it went into our very small bathroom where I rediscovered what a magnificent resource it is and immediately searched out a hardback secondhand version for £17, presently on it way from another OXFAM shop in Harrogate. That’s thread one.

Thread two emerged when I was browsing through the book and randomly came across the entry for Dwarf Elder which is given no less than seven pages by the gloriously erudite Grigson. Married three times, his last wife was Jane Grigson the food writer who – I discovered today during my flurry of research – believed that food is such an important component of being human flourishing that it deserves the same high standard of writing as any other form of literature. Of course she was absolutely spot on which is why I’ve got a shelf full of her books. That’s a side issue, though for the purposes of this piece of weaving, but what a family they must have been!

The main thread concerns the Dwarf Elder because I only saw the plant for the first time this year on the footpath to the north of the lakes at Woodchester Mansion. According to the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 it’s in steep decline across the country; probably partly due to the fact that it’s no longer planted as a medicinal herb often in churchyards in order, they believed, to improve its health giving qualities.

So threads three and four join the river at this point because Grigson points out that it’s a stronger version of the Common Elder, the roots and leaves of which can yield a blue dye and a powerful purgative. We should bear in mind that for many centuries (this plant gets mentioned by Dioscorides in his first century pharmacopeia ) – plants were prized more for their medicinal usefulness more than for their aesthetic qualities. However the more intriguing point is that its local name is Danewort and it was believed – perhaps due to the colour of the berries and leaves – that it sprang from the bodies, or more specifically the blood, of Danish invaders. The bloody colour and the doctrine of signatures gave the game away – it was thought. So far, so fascinating I thought, but then I (metaphorically) sat up straight because he wrote that the plant could still be found in 1974 in the village of Slaughterford which straddles By Brook. Hold on to that thought because I’ll come back to it for another thread. As it happens, and as you’ll know already if you’re a Potwell Inn regular, we drove over to Slaughterford only a few weeks ago in search of a pub which turned out to be in the next village of Ford. If you were even considering duplicating our trip I’d strongly advise approaching the pub from the A420 because the connection between Slaughterford and Ford is not much better than a muddy track.

But why Slaughterford? You have to ask don’t you? Grigson quotes the 17th century Wiltshire historian John Aubrey and then dismisses his assertion that Dwarf Elder aka Danewort or even Danesblood which still apparently grows in Slaughterford is the sign that a battle between King Alfred and the Danish invaders was fought in the village and resulted in the rout of the Danes with much slaughter. A quick scamper around Wikipedia establishes that the consensus today is that the battle was actually fought some miles away in Edington.

But in the early hours of this morning, I was mulling over what I’d discovered about Grigson, and another fact that came up was that he’d lived in “North Wiltshire”. Might he have lived in Slaughterford? was the tantalizing thought which kept me awake. The answer, after an early start on the laptop, was no he didn’t. But he did live quite nearby on the other side of Chippenham.

Gradually the picture was emerging that Slaughterford was not the scene of a famous battle fought by King Alfred and so how on earth did it come by such a gory name? The truth turns out to be that the name is a contraction from the Saxon of Sloe Thorn – and so the village name really means the river crossing where the sloes trees (Blackthorn) grows.

There must have been many crossing points on By Brook. At one time there were over twenty mills working there and we actually walked up the river past the last functioning paper mill in around 1970. Coming upon it while walking the banks from Corsham was quite a surprise – a semi derelict industrial site in the midst of the most beautiful valley. I’m waiting for my newer and more durable copy of the book to arrive, but what a fascinating journey from a Greek botanist to a 20th century poet. The Slaughterford myth gets repeated even in quite recent herbals – Mrs Grieve’s 1920’s book “A Modern Herbal” quotes it without comment.

There are two further points about By Brook I could make. Firstly the photos I took from the pub garden strongly suggest that the water is far more polluted and eutrophic than it was when we first encountered it in 1970. You’d probably find it impossible to make paper there now, and the brown trout also need clean and unpolluted water. But secondly, there is strong enough evidence to make it to the Natural History Museum website, that there is at least one family of beavers living on the brook. Thank goodness the beavers are vegetarian and therefore no threat to the local trout. In fact the fly fishers commissioned a report on the condition of the brook which recommended some modifications to the river bed to improve flows and slacks to help with breeding the native brown trout. Maybe they’ll get their wish granted free of charge by nature. I’m sure beavers and brown trout have lived in harmony in previous centuries before the beavers were hunted to extinction.

Postscript

My secondhand book arrived today – big thanks to OXFAM in Harrogate. It’s wonderful – in excellent condition and properly bound to lie flat. I absolutely love it! The paperback version can go back for an honourable retirement in the bookcase.

Cornish Tin Tabernacle makes the news.

Cadgwith is by no means one of the Lizard peninsula’s most threatened communities as long as you consider it as part of a larger area including Ruan Minor, Lizard Village and perhaps Poltesco. Between them they can offer an excellent pub almost on the shoreline (great Sunday lunch) and another in Lizard; both Methodist and Anglican churches, two schools; two post offices with a general store and café, a farm shop, a GP surgery which was still open this spring, a lifeboat station and a coastguard lookout run by volunteers; hotels, cafes and pasty shop, local arts and crafts galleries, probably the last serpentine turner in the county and some wonderful walks through a botanical wonderland. The small inshore fishing fleet is mainly run by part timers and – here’s the rub – there’s a superabundance of holiday lets. If you’re a plumber, or an electrician or builder; or if you’re happy to do a bit of cleaning you can earn a sensible living but as far as buying a house locally is concerned, you might as well resign yourself to a long commute from St Awful (that’s a local judgement, not mine) – or Camborne which is one of Cornwall’s most deprived towns. We tend to think of levelling up as a northern phenomenon but Cornwall has some of the poorest communities in the UK and like some parts of Wales, the only way up for many ambitious young people is also the way out.

If you’re a regular visitor to the Potwell Inn you’ll know that this part of South Cornwall is one of my favourite places on earth, most years we visit two or three times to hunt for plants; but you also need to know that simply liking the place, buying a Guernsey sweater and a hat with an embroidered anchor will not; will never make you a local. Upcountry is an unsettling and wicked place which necessitates passing through Devon and nothing good ever comes through Devon.

However, turning to Cadgwith once again, the tin tabernacle in the photo which is on the steep footpath from near the Todden and leading up to the car park is inaccessible except on foot. I took this photo in January 2022 – I’ve always loved these remnants of mission churches. We had one of them in Oldbury on Severn in the next-door parish to mine. There’s much more information about the Cadgwith chapel in the linked Guardian article published last week. The protesting cottage, also at the top of this piece is just a few steps further down the lane and reflects the majority view of the locals. When we grow old and forgetful it’s regarded as a personal tragedy but the mass influx of outsiders can just as surely drive out the community memories which are the glue that holds people together in shared experiences, and which is one reason why we were both so delighted to see that the little blue corrugated iron chapel has been given a grade 2 listing. Go inside and sit quietly on one of the blue pews and reflect on the courage of the volunteer lifeboat crew who, in 1907, went out to rescue 456 people from the stricken liner “Suevic” – and the vicar was a member of that crew.

Earlier this year we were having a pint in the pub on the Lizard and I noticed that one of the bar staff was wearing an RNLI pager. In Pembrokeshire last week we were on the Puffin shuttle bus going towards St Justinian when we had to stop to allow a car to pass and the bus driver stopped for a chat with the other driver – it’s that kind of bus route – and turned around to tell us that the man was, in fact, a member of the St David’s lifeboat crew; cue for a big cheer from the passengers! These things matter greatly. Community memories are hardwired into the whole landscape in these isolated places. Sustainable tourism demands a thoughtful attitude from those of us who are just visiting to ensure that we are not responsible for eroding and diluting those memories.

We’ll soon be back for another month in paradise – the campervan may be a bit cramped, but it’s like a holiday cottage on wheels once you’ve learned how to live like a submariner and put things away in the right place every time.

Looking over Cadgwith Cove from Inglewidden

“Send three and fourpence – going to a dance.”

Shaggy Soldier

It’s not a great photograph for sure, but the family name Galinsoga triggered the memory of a story my dad used to tell about a wartime message which began as “send reinforcements, going to advance” and having been passed by mouth from messenger to messenger finally arrived at headquarters as “Send three and fourpence, going to a dance”. The trigger, of course was the similarity, when spoken, between Galinsoga and Gallant Soldier.

As ever I turned to Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellous 1958 book “An Englishman’s Flora” which lists Latin and English folk names, county by county for hundreds of familiar flowering plants. Galinsoga is something of an outlier in the book because it lists only one name by way of explanation to describe these “thin, long legged, little flowered daisies, ray flowers white, disc flowers yellow – annual, naturalised little cockneys in a waste corner or uncultivated garden” and makes the link between the plant name and the 18th century Spanish botanist Don Mariano Martinez de Galinsoga.

Many of the plants mentioned in the book have dozens of local folk names which would (at least the Oxfordshire ones) have been familiar to my mother. Every time I open the book I get a pang to think of the loss of local dialects; it only took a few turns of the page to discover that in Gloucestershire the Spindle tree was known as Skiver – which isn’t a name I’ve ever heard. But what about “Single Gussies”, “Smear Docken” or “Son afore the father”? What about “Arse smart”? The rich and earthy poetry of plant names has all but disappeared by now. I remember an old man in Pucklechurch delightedly telling my young sister that the Dandelion she’d picked was really called “Piss the Bed”. I can see the point of the Latin binomials if a native botanist of Gloucestershire was trying to compare Pulmonaria (Jerusalem Cowslip) notes with a neighbour from Herefordshire who called it Spotted Virgin” – but there’s a wealth of folklore and pre-scientific medical wisdom hidden within the local dialect names. It’s a great book to browse and I’ve almost worn my battered paperback copy out – I’ll have to shell out for a properly stitched hardback copy one of these days.

He’s behind you!

Southern Hawker dragonfly

Oh I do love a traditional pantomime joke! I couldn’t resist taking this shot of a Southern Hawker Dragonfly on the allotment today, apparently stalking a Ladybird on the other side of the cane. We’d only just been talking about the absence of many of our familiar visitors during this very unseasonable summer, and then today we had 20C and sunshine, so they all came out to play. There were Damselflies in turquoise and ruby as well as this fierce but beautiful Dragonfly plus many other flying insects. We’ve even had our first newt in the pond.

The warm, wet weather has led to a plague of weeds and so since we got back from St David’s we’ve spent hours every day pulling them up. As it happens I really enjoy hand weeding so it’s not so much of a chore and – being a bit obsessive – I get a kick out of making a good job of it. The downside in the polytunnel today was that it was so very hot, approaching 30C with very little wind to stir the air. There was another find, as ever not in the least rare, but I’ve never seen it before. There are two members of the Galinsoga family in the UK – known by the English names “Shaggy Soldiers” and “Gallant Soldiers” this one was the hairier and scruffier version . The yellow flower also appeared out of nowhere – it’s one of the St John’s Worts this one the “imperforate” form, which is to say there are no little holes to be seen when you hold the leaf up to the sun. We think it must have come from a packet of wildflower mix that our son gave us. Madame remembers broadcasting the seed probably three years ago and it’s finally popped up in two places. Weeds are fun; very diverse and surprising, and Imperforate St John’s Wort is suitable (like Pot Marigolds) for making a very good antiseptic cream.

The other notable thing about the Dragonfly picture is how superior the focus, exposure and depth of field it is when compared with my phone camera. It’s a bit trickier to set up a shot than the point and press phone, but the reward is an altogether better and more useful picture. Sometimes the identity of a plant depends on a few glandular hairs that need really detailed shots.

After the tunnel was weeded I fed all the plants with liquid seaweed fertilizer and picked our first ripe tomato – delicious but only the one between us. Tonight we’ll be eating here with another of our sons – we’ve got three – and we’ve got our own home-grown peas, broad beans courgettes and potatoes plus home grown fresh herbs. Tayberries and strawberries for pud and a glass or two of wine I don’t doubt. We sometimes moan about the hard work and the bad backs; but the flavour of our own vegetables is outstanding – this is no place for modesty – and everyone should at least try to grow a few veg even if it’s just a few herbs and a tomato in a pot outside the front door. I promise you’ll want more. Last night we went over to Bristol to see our grandson in his year 6 leavers play – Robin Hood with some outstanding performances and lots of fart jokes. The fact that loads of dads turned up on the same night as the England v Holland match teaches something about love! Life can be very beautiful. Even the dreaded Chickweed – in the right place.

Life in the very, very slow lane

The view across Rhosson towards Ramsey Island

As I write this I’m watching the picture load extremely slowly at the top of the page. It may not sound particularly glamorous to take a two week holiday in the midst of a bog/marsh/mire (all of them feature) but the advantage is that there’s a completely different flora here; one that I’m not very familiar with, so every walk is revelatory in some way. Yesterday, as is the manner of Wales, it rained and blew a hoolie all day and I spent many happy hours in the campervan, cataloguing and identifying all the plants I’d photographed. However the downside of a bit of remoteness is that the internet ran unbelievably slowly, and I don’t mean just less than the 100 megabits we’re used to – I mean 50 kilobits max. This is turning into that famous good news/bad news Chinese proverb because yesterday was also UK election day and so we spent the whole day sans telly, sans politics and sans anything that makes me bang my head on the wall. On balance it was better that way. Our friends in Bristol had an election party going on – attended by some high profile politicos. We’d bowed out because we were here in the campervan, but the party, they said this morning, failed to ignite because at the very moment Rees Mogg was ejected (cheers) Farage was elected (boos). And so for fear of being misinterpreted by the citizens of Clifton and Hotwells the massive explosion was not ignited. Then there were the supporters of Thangam Debbonaire who lost their MP and a few greens who gained one. Ah life ….. always complicated. We went to bed after the exit polls were announced but I still woke at 6.00am pretending to myself (unsuccessfully) that it didn’t matter.

Of course it mattered. And after a day processing the news it’s obviously better that a Labour government have taken over, and obviously better that the Lib Dems (left of Labour) did so well, and still obviously better that Ed Miliband has replaced Therese Coffey at Environment, and even more obviously better that a number of independents had shown the door to their labour predecessors over Gaza. It’s taken 24 hours for me to relax a bit and feel safer for the first time since Thatcher was elected in 1979. I don’t count the Blair government because Tony Blair was just Thatcher Lite, although Gordon Brown -aside from the hugely expensive PFI contracts – was in the right place. It’s so good to feel that at last the global environmental crisis might come up on the UK agenda, and that UK citizens have voted so decisively for ordinary decency over windbag oratory. Of course the knuckle draggers deserve their place in the sun and then we can all laugh at them and ring a rejuvenated NHS to warn them that they’ve come off their medication – but if anyone ever needed a full brain transplant it would be good to get hold of an unused model – a top of the range Farage for instance.

Here in the van,though, I discovered the cause of the internet breakdown (flat mobile router battery) and fixed it (turned it on); only to discover that it was the signal that was feeble. And so I write this with no expectation that it will escape the marshes of St Davids. But – message in a bottle style -I hope it finds you well. We sent postcards to our grandchildren and the Post Office staff in St David’s seemed almost absurdly grateful today. We also once found a Spanish lottery ticket in a bottle washed up in the bay across from here. I never did anything about it and it’s still tucked inside my first Welsh Dictionary. Hardly anyone speaks Welsh here.

This is the kind of place where I go after plants like a dog might go after smells. The new OLympus TG-7 camera is excellent with just a couple of quibbles. The GPS takes a while to log on to the satellites but if you leave it on the whole time it runs the battery down. But the picture quality is much better than my Pixel 6a. As ever I need to work out a suitable workflow. Today we rested in the warm sunshine. It was good!

That was then!

Our rented cottage around 52 years ago – our home for three years
The same cottage on Thursday

Generally speaking I prefer not to go back – it tends to leave me feeling a bit disarticulated; but this week, at Madame’s suggestion, we took our youngest son for a walk around the district surrounding our old Art School, and even went to see the cottage we lived in over fifty years ago. In a sense nothing had changed and yet everything had changed. We lived then on a 400 acre dairy farm which is now a 400 acre beef farm growing cereals rather than hay. The geography never changes, of course. The farm is still perched at the upper edge of a steep Cotswold valley; the brook still flows along the bottom and new trees, now the elms are all gone, have seized the opportunity to fill the gaps.

But the brook is looking a bit polluted and eutrophic, the cereal crop has been infiltrated by Black Grass which, because of its capacity for carrying ergot, is needing constant attention and spraying – one of the unforeseen side effects of warm and wet winters. A serious infestation can reduce the crop by up to 70%. There were no grazing cattle to be seen anywhere, nor any pigs or hens. The traditional mixed farm is gone; the dairy where we went every day to collect warm raw milk, has been repurposed as holiday rentals and the place where a barn once stood is now a storage area for caravans. The little terrier who once attacked anything that moved is a just memory and the matriarch of the family who we’d often see sitting outside on wooden chair plucking a chicken to the accompaniment of many growls from the dog is a memory too.

As for the Art School, most of the modern buildings we used have been demolished and the traditional 17th century stone ones mainly converted into flats. The lane which we walked down every day is infilled with tastefully modern houses, but the farm is still run by the next generation of the same family, the farmhouse is run as a bed and breakfast. Being there, in the place we spent three years, felt both familiar and yet remote – but more than any built features it was the silence that struck us. There was nothing louder than the rustling of leaves.

After our visit we went down to Corsham Court, which was closed to visitors and then on to look for a pub. The local, once called The Packhorse, has been renamed The Flemish Weaver as a nod to the refugees who brought their 17th century skills to the village and influenced the design of the tall houses in the High Street; but that was one place I didn’t particularly want to go back into. I prefer the memory of the awful rough cider and its drinkers who mostly got the shakes after about six months on the stuff – oh and the dangerous yellow ceiling that dripped liquid nicotine on the floor on the busy nights when heat and human sweat combined. We once took an American visitor there and after a few pints of scrumpy we missed him for a while and found him clinging to the lamp post outside.

But Wiltshire is an exquisitely beautiful county and so then we went off in search of another pub whose location I had misremembered; and we took to some fantastically narrow lanes and found Slaughterford again – who could resist such a name – but then had to drive on to the next village through an even narrower lane with no possibility of passing an oncoming vehicle and driving through deep potholes which threatened to smash the suspension. All very pioneering stuff.

Having finally reached the tiny hamlet we found the pub sitting next to the brook and looking for all the world as if it was auditioning for the part of the Potwell Inn – except for the fact (?) that the Potwell Inn is never that busy in my imagination and the real landlady isn’t nearly as well upholstered as the fat lady in the novel and didn’t seem at all likely to form a warm relationship with a wandering tramp like Alfred Polly. The food was good, though and our son seemed delighted with the two eye-catching young bar staff. I, obviously paid no attention to them all. Really!

The photos here were taken with a new camera with large numbers of options hiding behind the knobs. It’s ultra strong, waterproof and will take excellent macro photographs using focus stacking as soon as I can afford a suitable low level tripod. This was just a practice run but we’re soon off to Pembrokeshire where I’ll be able to give it a proper workout.

It’s felt as if we are snatching our food from under the wheels of the climate deniers

Potatoes, broad beans, tayberries and strawberries

At this time of year it’s hard not to be wide awake at 5.00am, and more particularly this year because the timetable on the allotment has been condensed by about a month. A late, wet spring and a mild winter have challenged our ingenuity, so when to sow and plant have become more of a gamble than ever. The plants, on the other hand, are able to compensate for their straightened circumstances and race to complete their cycle of growth. “Time is short” – they seem to think – “Let’s get on with it!”; and I know that talking to your vegetables is thought to be a sign of madness, but they talk to us all the time and it’s downright churlish not to at least acknowledge what they’re saying. At best we are intelligent companions to our allotment plots. We sow and hoe; feed and water, and try to protect them from beasties and east winds as best we can.

It can feel like endless hard labour; hitched like a trailer to the back of a runaway season. The Potwell Inn may seem like a dream life, furnished with warm evenings and cool wine; perfumed by nectar – but it ain’t nothing of the sort. Tasks pile up and all we can do is take the most urgent from the top of the pile while the bindweed shoulders its way across from the abandoned allotment next door. More like a guerilla war against entropy – made far more difficult by knuckle dragging politicians and their sweet talking lobbyists as they bury their tiny brains in the sand and pretend that nothing is going on. But there is always pleasure to be got from drawing on sixty years of experience. Picking just the right tool from the chaotic shed; the draw hoe that will slice the weeds off at the ground if we keep it sharp, the cultivating tool for working compost and pelleted organic fertilizer into the surface; the indispensable ridging tool which gets used just once a year. Hand tools aren’t just useful, they become companions.

The compensations are still there to be snatched out of harm’s way. Our new potatoes came on last week, and they are so sweet I’d pay a tenner for a plateful with a big knob of butter. We grow a first early called Red Duke of York and in early season they’re better even than the Arran Pilots that my father and grandfather swore by. Broad (Fava) beans have done well this year and, again, we eat half of them uncooked- straight off the plants – as we do the strawberries and tayberries. We revert to the prehistoric practise of foraging our patch of earth in spring and then freeze and store; make jams and pickles and sauces in the autumn. Our neighbours probably see our plot as a disgracefully unkempt and weedy riot, but the insects, bees and pollinators; the dragonflies and damselflies and hoverflies wouldn’t agree as they work the clumps of catmint and marjoram. On a good day you can hear them even above the continuous noise of the passing traffic and the ambulances ferrying the casualties of modern life to the hospital.

But then, of necessity, there’s much more than just allotmenteering to contend with. There’s cooking and eating; cleaning painting and decorating, shopping and baking before a moment can be found for a bit of botanising, let alone writing. Did I even mention arthritic hands and knees? – the unwanted honours of getting old. The average summer day begins appallingly early as light floods into the bedroom; the hours race by and by five o’clock in the afternoon and against all common sense we break open a bottle of vinous sedative and talk about love, and children (harder than herding cats) and plan campervan trips. In between times there are always new skills to learn, new accomplishments to strive for. There are no mountains to climb and no dull cruises to endure because our bucket lists are full of the mundane and the ordinary which – given a good light and a fair wind – can sparkle like a teenage dream.

So it’s now eight am and I’m off to the kitchen to make strong coffee and wake Madame. The day begins.

Hmmm – fish pie!