About the Potwell Inn – Page 15

This page is not sponsored by Dr Bowler’s Brown Bowel Oil Company.

Actually this site isn’t sponsored at all, but runs at a built in loss because I created the site; write all the material; publish it (1008 posts and 824,256 words); take all the photos and pay all the bills. I have no desire at all to become an influencer and I cope with the money side by not looking.

I do like it when people read my stuff and like it, and I love it when my follower count goes up – who wouldn’t? – but just recently I’ve noticed a few corporate followers and when I check them out (I like to know who’s following and read their stuff) I discover that they’re pushing expensive pink website pills that will make me a pile of money and followers in return for ……..what exactly? I’d only sell myself if I could work out a price but unsolicited bundles of used notes are always acceptable. I guess it’s actually pointless writing this because they probably don’t read my stuff at all. I can imagine there are all sorts of AI bots crawling over it like maggots in a tin and stealing my copy. That would at least infect the next AI generation with a punctuation problem because all my posts are really scripts and written to be read aloud. The punctuation is a deeply obscure personal code to measure out exact packets of silence between words, clauses, sentences and paragraphs. The secret of writing for the ear is to control the silences. Apart from that I welcome GCHQ and other espionage agencies into my world because I love to waste their time – and if anyone is pinching my stuff I’d appreciate a credit at least.

I wanted to recall a true story of something that happened while I was training as a curate in St Mary Redcliffe Church – another institution with a bit of a branding problem. Every year Penny Bron (sadly no longer with us) and the people at the Cancer Care Centre in Clifton organised a glitzy Christmas carol service to which the great and the good flocked in their diamonds and fur coats. You could smell the mothballs. It was all forgivable because many thousands of pounds were raised to support her excellent work. After the service we were all usually invited up to the Mansion House to meet the exceptionally great and good for drinks with the Lord Mayor – that year it was Joan Jones who, for some reason, I’d really hit it off with. Then a couple of events happened that threw it all off course. Firstly the big star, The BBC chief correspondent Kate Adie, got called out to the Middle East because the prospect of the Gulf War was in the process of becoming a reality. Then a number of other celebrities were delayed, sick, or unavailable and so when it came to the reading of the nine lessons, we discovered after the service had started that we were three readers short. I was sitting opposite the boss and at the first long silence he nodded at me and I went to the lectern and read. I had a reading to do myself, so I returned to the lectern again. At reading number six I rose once again in my growing magnificence and then finally came the final reading from St John’s Gospel – again missing a reader.

I’ve got a bit of a thing about St John’s Gospel. The opening words invite us to see the creation as an entirely new beginning ex nihilo; a word, a performative utterance, something so unspeakably powerful that what was spoken came into being. A writer’s dream. I gave it everything I had. The page in front of me was a printed from the programme and as I reached the final sentence I spotted at the bottom, these words:

This page is sponsored by Pascoe’s Complete Dog Food.

If you are casting about for the perfect example of bathos please help yourself. After the service finished I was approached at the North Porch by a woman who said she had lost her husband. A little gentle probing – you can understand why – revealed that she’d arranged to meet her husband after the service but he hadn’t turned up and she thought he might have gone “straight to the reception” [this is the beginning of an hilarious misunderstanding]. I wasn’t intending to go because after a couple of years gasping with boredom, I just wanted to go home. So I said “oh well never mind I’ll drop you off there”. Off we went up to Clifton and swept into the Mansion House Drive where we could see the lights on but the main door was closed. I rang the bell and we waited for a while and then the butler – an enormously tall Cornishman, dressed for a career playing Scrooge in panto, opened the door and asked our names. This is a bit weird I thought, but he said “Follow Me” (I capitalised that because it was a kind of order) and so we did. I had no idea what my companion’s name was so we said who we were, followed him to a set of huge double doors which he threw open and introduced us by name.

The table was laid for the great and good and, as he announced us, my companion looked at me in blind panic and said “What do we do?” and I whispered “let’s just see what happens” at which point Joan Jones, bless her, understood what had happened and walked up to me; gave me a huge hug and a kiss on the cheek and ordered Poldark to set two more places and then set us down between Bernard Levin and Jenny Murray. Luckily my companion was in an evening dress and I was still wearing a Persian silk cassock which could get me in anywhere.

Dare I say, we had a marvellous evening. At around 1.00am I dropped her off at the Grand Hotel and said – “don’t tell your husband where you’ve been he won’t believe you.” The next morning she rang to say that the reception she was supposed to be at was at the Lloyds Bank headquarters. I’ve never seen or heard from her since.

Anyway – if you’re a corporate you’ll glean from this that I don’t like corporate do’s and I think sponsorship is ruinous. I do love good readers because without you all these hours at the laptop would be a complete waste of time, and I love followers who can cope with my scattergun posts. The next performance of the Widcombe Mummers is New Year’s Day at 12.45 on Widcombe Parade. There will probably be a performance by the Marshfield Mummers on Boxing Day at 11.00am in the Market Place – but you’d better check that. They have the most wonderfully inventive costumes made from torn newspaper. I’ve always followed Oscar Wilde’s advice that you should try everything once except for Morris Dancing and incest; but these old traditions (obviously not the incest one – this not darkest Gloucestershire) – are a kind of wormhole into the past.

Now, eight years out into the glorious liberation I can bear to recall Christmas as it once felt; relentless, exhausting and fun, and as I’m completely incapacitated by a cold I may write again before Christmas, but if not – have a good one!

The Wassail – here’s one I blessed earlier!

Photographed in one of the Marcher Apple Network orchards last year; saucy little vixens eh?

I thought I’d been quietly retired from my role at the Littleton on Severn Wassail. Last year no invitation arrived and I thought to myself ‘that’s it then’. As soon as my successor arrived in the parish I’d offered him the job and he’d said that he’d just watch me next time round to get the hang of it. I could sense after the first time that he thought it was a bit pagan. He was wrong of course; wassailing is thoroughly, indubitably and cheerfully pagan. Over the years it grew to include the election of a king and queen for the night, memorably won one evening by a gay couple after a totally rigged vote. There was a huge bonfire, a mummers play, a folk song group and a great deal of cider. My job was to stand on a picnic bench and bless the trees while shotguns primed with black powder were fired at the sky by green men and women hidden in the trees. Smoke and flames from the shotguns and much shouting and banging of saucepans followed in order – I insist – to drive the devil out. The 2024 event will also feature a ukulele band which may well do a better job of devil driving. My new colleague was pretty shocked by all this boozy revelry and cross dressing and, I think – being a good evangelical, took the job on last year in order to reign in the revelry and anoint the event with brief talk about Jesus. Needless to say it played badly with a press ganged congregation.

There’s a skill to rural ministry that takes a while to learn, and because I believe that all God talk is utterly inadequate and therefore heretical I’m not remotely fazed by anyone else’s attempt to express the mystery in a different way; so harvest festivals, Plough Monday blessings, and carol singing are all as powerful in their way as weddings, funerals and baptisms. A lifetime of talking and listening to people in extremis and in everyday situations has taught me that most of them had always thought very deeply about the great mysteries – more than many bishops, I might say, and that to interrupt them and try to correct their theological grammar is grossly impertinent and insulting. I’ve never met a more lucid natural theologian than the late Bob Talbot who, with his wife Rene ran a fishing tackle shop in Bedminster. I sat fishing with him on a river bank one morning and listened entranced by and envious of his spiritual connection with nature.

Anyway, the invitation arrived yesterday asking if I might think about blessing the orchard once more at the next Wassail. The letter from the Secretary of the Cider Club popped up on the laptop and I asked Madame what she thought. We’ve both got longstanding connections with the parish, the pub and for Madame the cider orchard too. She beat me to it because she was working for Long Ashton Research Station soon after we married, and was a part of the team of horticulturalists and scientists who planted and maintained it as an experimental plot behind the pub in the 1970’s. Later we would drink in the White Hart on Jazz nights, and later still I became vicar of the parish.

Littleton has always been a cider producing area. One local farm would make several thousand gallons of cider every year for the farm labourers as part of their pay. Even as late as the 1970’s the labourers at the research station orchards were entitled to a daily allowance of it. If you bite into a real cider apple the bitter flavour of the tannins will pucker your mouth and it will feel dry; but they contain a surprising amount of juice. Stories abound of throwing rats or bacon into the barrels to improve fermentation and although no-one has ever actually owned up to doing it in my presence, I’ve no doubt that any meat and bones would be quickly dissolved in the acidity of the ferment. On some farms, women were not allowed into the cider houses because it was feared they would stop the fermentation. This was a regular occurrence for Madame and me when I bought cider and she was asked to wait in the car while I went in for a wet. I learned fast that a wet was never less than a pint and sometimes two so I said no.

The Wassail is on and I’m happy about it. The Cider Club these days has many more incomers than original born and bred members but the village still has the capacity to replicate its historical culture through the pub, the cider club and even the church. As long as those fateful words “we always do it this way” are never uttered, cultures can adapt and embrace new ideas. This year the Winter Solstice comes at 3.27am on Friday morning and for me it can’t come too soon. There will be bonfires and songs no doubt and I’d feel completely free to join in the celebration except I’ll hopefully be asleep and in bed trying to get over a lousy cold.

The end of the wild is nigh!

Do I think that apples would fail to pollinate without prayers, or crops never grow without ploughs being blessed? Do I think that without the Yule celebrations the days would get ever darker? No, not a bit. But I do believe that these celebrations are the way we manifest our connection with and dependence upon the earth, her tides and seasons but even more importantly our dependence on one another; on human community and shared values.

I used to be a bit scared by the sandwich board men in Bristol and their gloomy message that the end of the world was just around the corner. To my infant eyes, immediately after the war, looking across the bombed buildings and burnt out churches it seemed as if we were halfway there already. Nowadays the earth is in greater peril than ever but we’re choking and drowning in the terrible conjunction of affluence, indifference and effluents. The celebration of the seasons puts us back in the right relationship with the earth without which we’ll find it hard to motivate ourselves to change.

In case I don’t get to write for a little while – It’s going to be very busy for the next couple of weeks – Happy Whatever!

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves”

Confucius wasn’t wrong there

I’d be happy never to have to write a post like this again.

My grandfather suffered as an old man from nightmares about slaughtering animals on the family smallholding. He told me how he would balance on the top rung of a five bar gate and swing a poleaxe, aiming – but not always successfully – to stun the animal with a single blow piercing the skull. There was a gap of more than sixty years between the original act and the nightmares that, he said, tormented him.

My Dad came back from the Second World War mentally and physically wrecked. Aside from the physical injuries of crushed lungs, he suffered from agoraphobia, bouts of depression and alcoholism. I’m not setting myself up as a victim here, but the war- for my Dad, in the Western desert as it happens – was the constant background to my childhood. Ask any soldier and they will tell you that the price of war doesn’t end with a triumphal parade through the city centre. In fact he came home sick and in many ways lived his entire life, until his eighties, in the shadow of traumas he rarely if ever talked about. Nobody is suggesting that his cause was unjust but alongside thousands of his compatriots including some, probably most, of my teachers; the rest of his life was bent like a windswept tree; shriven by his experiences.

So after wars are ended, as they surely must be, by negotiation and compromise, what can we do for the thousands of young men and women who have performed and seen terrible acts of violence and desecration under the protection of the state and under the inspiration of cruel ideologies, who, when it’s all over, can never revisit their innocence. There will be very little gratitude, for there will always be new graves to dig. There will be no winners or losers; just endless nightmarish dreams of revenge.

Wars are mostly started by old men for self aggrandisement and sponsored by arms dealers and states which prefer proxy wars which are more deniable. But they’re fought by young men and women and there’s a grave at both ends of every weapon. A life taken and a life ruined; either way round, it makes little difference . The only way forward is to put the weapons down.

Hope in a hopeless world

My school career ended ignominiously when I was manhandled out of the building by the Headmaster for being a bit challenging…. by even being there! My closest friend Eddie had left voluntarily a month before me and was now working for the Port of Bristol Authority, getting rides on tugboats, and being paid for it! I was about leave my photographic technician’s job at the University and get a labouring job with a welding and fabricating company where I learned to weld and saw up big lengths of rolled steel joist; an occupation that has made me prematurely deaf. One of the jolly tricks the old hands would play on newcomers was to lock you inside a metal tank and then sledgehammer the sides so that your ears rang for days. The hydraulic saw that I used, threw fountains of white hot molten metal at me and sounded like the gates of hell. It was exciting and well paid but exhausting, hot and dangerous. The men I worked with were a bunch of highly skilled desperados who knew their worth to the company and taught me a number of insults so utterly disgusting I’ve had to ration myself. That phase lasted around three years and any number of jobs during which time any glamour attached to industrial life wore off. In the nick of time, aged 18, I met Madame, who was 15 and she got me a place at Tech College where I felt alive again apart, that is, from having to work nights alone in a factory cutting up sheets of polyurethane foam for the workers in the morning and with nothing but rats for company.

The reason for this background stuff is that I took A Level Sociology at college, and in my group was another student called Peter who appeared to be a different life-form from anyone else I’d ever met. It was impossible to tell whether his pronouncements were attributable to stupidity or bigotry; probably both. I write this because I often read journalists lamenting the rise of populist politics as if it started in the UK about ten years ago. In fact during the 1930’s King Edward 111 was a known nazi sympathiser. Half the aristocracy were with him and Oswald Mosley was injecting his venomous ideas into society.

By the mid 1960’s Peter was a fully formed racist, homophobic and sexist pain in the backside who had never been troubled by a moment’s reflection. How our wonderful Jewish lecturer put up with him was a mystery – but now? ……… Well we are where we are I suppose. Every way we turn, we see newly minted clones of Peter in positions of power; the fact that you couldn’t fabricate a half decent brain from a room full of them (although even a failed experiment might benefit the world), is a clue as to precisely why we are where we are.

And so to COP 28 where a non enforceable agreement to do precisely nothing has been trumpeted as a triumph by its only beneficiaries. And so, also, to Gaza and Ukraine; to Rwanda and to a prison ship in Portland Dorset, and to the homeless beggars and the hungry and impoverished children; and to the sufferers of preventable and treatable disease …… do I need to go on? Should I mention the endless waiting lists for affordable housing or the empty second homes and flats given over to Airbnb to enrich their owners? Should I mention the untreated shit flowing past our flat in the polluted river?

Even as I read these paragraphs I know in my heart that Charles Dickens could have written these words and that they would have been equally true. Homo homini lupus est – perhaps better translated people are wolves towards other people is one classical quotation you’re unlikely to hear Boris, sorry, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, using – although my sensitivity to sexist language seems a bit out of place in this context.

Truthfully, we’ve been drifting apart for years, like elves and dwarves, with the elves believing against all the evidence that decency and democracy will always win, and that the dwarves are really decent people who’ve just taken a wrong turn and to whom we should be kind in order to effect their transformation. Hm!

Am I distressed by all this? Hell yes! Distressed, angry and heartbroken. Yesterday there was a brief moment of hope that the Government might complete the task of euthanizing itself, but somehow the corpse overcame its apnoea and took another terrible gasp. My/our only solace is in the same Nature that’s threatened by them. Goodness knows I’ve preached often enough that without our mortality, love would become meaningless. But I’ve never really taken on board the fact that the more threatened the earth is, the more precious it becomes, and, for instance, the Winter Heliotrope in the photograph taken in Cornwall last January and back on the canal bank yesterday, becomes a pledge, a token of continuity in the depths of winter. We planted bulbs a few weeks ago in the little garden we’ve created outside the flats and now they’re pushing through the soil. I’m busy identifying old photographs of plants and fungi and recording them. I can already imagine the perfume of the soil in spring as it heats in the sun, and the prospect of another plant hunting season. I’ve got plans for new trips and for exploring new ideas – none of which will change the world but which are, cumulatively, a way of taking up pitchforks and cudgels against the enemies of joy and flourishing.

I absolutely refuse to be taken in by the imaginary world of dark caverns and darker threats where fear is normalized as a tool of control. We’ll fight them with carnivals, punish them with songs and drill into their little minds with poetry and drama letting in some purgative light. Oh and Peter – if you haven’t already gone to the great dictator in the skies; mind how you go eh?

COPOUT 28

After a certain amount of unsubtle lobbying, Madame bought the final two volumes of Geoffrey Kibby’s magnum opus for my birthday but wouldn’t let me open the package until Sunday morning. She is a strict traditionalist in such matters, but then we were swept away to a family gathering before I had time to settle down and look at them. The gathering was fun but only highlighted the growing generational gulf between those who play computer games and the rest of us who treat mobiles and laptops as useful tools and prefer talking to each other. It was early evening before I was alone with the books and they are very good indeed. All I need now is a good microscope and some dangerous chemicals.

However I should point out that Geoffrey Kibby took four years to produce volume one because all the illustrations were hand drawn and painted. The subsequent three volumes were illustrated with the help of an iPad and a very good computer programme in less than two years. Sadly I left the Apple ecosystem some years ago after a contemptuous young sales assistant held up my old Macbook by one corner and declared it not repairable because it was too old. At least I think it was the laptop he was talking about! With a good deal of help from my son I moved over to a Chromebook at half the price and rather quicker to begin work.

The revelation that the illustrations were done on a tablet came as a bit of a shock because they’re so good, so I’ve bought a stylus and downloaded a free programme on to Madame’s Pixel Tablet. Work has now ground to a halt because the allegedly intuitive programme looks as if it needs a degree in computer illustration before I find it remotely intuitive. Madame thinks it would be better to keep on with pencils and watercolours.

Over the last few weeks I’ve fallen in with a bunch of Natural History desperados for whom spiders are the most beautiful creatures on earth. Their Facebook group which I was invited to join outpaces the British Mycological Society postings by two to one. So a decently obscure specimen can flatten the battery on my phone in half a day. Madame suspects me either of having an affair in code or being completely mad.

I find that the fierce concentration on identifying specimens creates a wonderful quiet space in my head at a time when what’s going on all around is feeling like living in a psychotic vision. We’ve reached the point where I have to leave the room during news bulletins and I’ve come to think that COP 28 – in fact most of the ideas being circulated about heading off a climate catastrophe is nothing more that the usual hubristic nonsense that sees us as owners of the Earth. The Earth doesn’t need us and we can’t own it -we’re just noisy, wicked and destructive tenants and although I came to understand that – generally – the bereaved don’t follow Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grieving to the letter, I can see elements of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance in abundance at the COP meetings and in most of the planning for our (very short) future. The good news – if there is any – is that all parties could be on the same trajectory; just at different places on it. In all my experience of bereavement – and there’s a lot of it – the worst thing you could say to anyone is “time to move on”. However; that doesn’t excuse wilful and deliberately destructive bad behaviour. If the Earth is our parent – and I can’t see it any other way – then the plagues we are enduring are admonitions for our bad behaviour. I’m not turning this into a religious argument because so far as I’m concerned any chatter about God is heretical because it’s (by definition) inadequate. What’s wrong with reverential silence?

About foraging

Although I didn’t agree with the general conclusions of Charlie Gilmour’s piece on foraging in this weekend’s Observer newspaper I’d agree that the craft of foraging can be a great builder of relationship with the natural world. I’ll never forget the sense of gratitude that followed a blackberrying expedition with Madame in which we harvested many pounds of free fruit and subsequently ruined all of them in a truly disgusting chutney. Foraging will always entail a few culinary skills as well as the observational and identification skills that should keep you out of Intensive Care. That said, we have safely foraged and eaten many pounds of field mushrooms and enjoyed them greatly; but even a field mushroom has close relatives and lookalikes that demand identification skills. Most of the folk tales – can you peel it? does it blacken silver? are absolute nonsense and so we come back to experience and prior knowledge. If I can share the single most important question to ask of any fungus (or indeed plant) is – “where’s it growing?” The immediate environment; open field or field edge? maybe woodland but if that, what kind of trees? What kind of soil or underlying rock is it – acid or limestone? Is it growing on dead wood or in the ground? There’s always the possibility, as on the Mendip Hills, that an otherwise harmless edible plant or fungus has absorbed poisonous heavy metals, and many fungi have confusing lookalikes. Fairy Ring Champignons which are edible and dry well; can sometimes even share a ring with Fool’s Funnels – Clitocybe rivulosa which is poisonous.

It’s the kind of breezy confidence that all will be well which short circuits the hard labour of learning plants and fungi; I should know because the only reason I’m here writing this is that on several occasions I’ve prepared poisonous fungi and even started cooking them, when a last minute change of heart saved my/our skin. I even poisoned the cat on one occasion but mercifully after a good heave and a rash, she lived to tell the tale. Even worse, two highly experienced mycologists I know have developed an intolerance for the St George’s Mushroom after decades of eating it safely. There could be long queues of very sick people waiting for liver transplants if foraging became suddenly fashionable. The idea of sending naive collectors out into the fields and forests after a one-day course really scares me.

As does the idea of French style hunting days – otherwise known as circular firing squads – with inexperienced people thrashing around in the woods with no idea how to fire a gun safely. Once again I speak from experience having almost been shot by an overexcited man who – having paid his £500 for a day’s pheasant shooting, forgot the rule about shooting above the trees and gave me and our son the fright of our lives, with lead shot hitting the trees all around us. He was, I’m pleased to say, sent home immediately! Frankly, if you want to eat a pheasant – and spatchcocked mice and roast fox don’t float my boat (see article) – then buy one from a game dealer and save yourself retching over the entrails when you finally find out that most living creatures are full of glistening plumbing, oh and well hung squirrel and other roadkill can give you all sorts of weird diseases that will keep the doctors from their beds. I have no absolute problem with killing and preparing living creatures but the taking of any life should never be done for fun or sport but to meet a genuine need and it requires some skill, so it’s important to seek a good teacher.

When we were at art school we had to work all the vacations to make ends meet, and one summer I worked next door to a slaughterhouse where hundreds of pigs were killed every day. That was my first and best ever lesson in industrial meat production and it left an indelibly negative impression on me. But I learned about gutting and skinning rabbits sitting on the shed step with the head groundsman where I worked another two summers and who made it all look easy. When we kept chickens I got the local butcher to show me how to kill them without cruelty and he showed me why it was never really worth plucking pheasants or pigeons. If, as Charlie Gilmour says, you feel the need for foraged meat protein then you have to take responsibility, be a moral grownup and learn to do the job well. Does all this sound off-putting? Well – it’s the reality – and there’s no escape by trying to pass the responsibility onto someone else.

So that’s fungi and foraged meat dealt with, but what about plants, grains and suchlike? My big fear is that hordes of indiscriminate foragers could do untold damage to precious environments. Already, in Cornwall, professional foragers from outside of the area (obviously they come from Devon or worse still, down from London) have stripped whole roadsides of wild garlic and in Epping Forest mushroom hunters have been caught with upwards of 30 Kg of fungi. People I know well think nothing of harvesting thousands of Psilocybe mushrooms on the Bannau Brycheiniog but maybe that’s a different issue! However – and here I’m with Charlie Gilmour – if the end result is a new generation of naturalists who understand and love the natural world, coming to it via an interest in foraging, then what’s not to like? We should stop being so sniffy about people who ask about edibility on fungus websites and at least point them in the direction of the best help. I appreciate the caution about liability and insurance and all that, but duty of care can be expressed more helpfully than blanket prohibition accompanied by harsh words.

The world of plants is absolutely fascinating but foraging is never going to be capable of feeding the world short of some catastrophic collapse in the population, so let’s just see it as a getting to know you operation where our knowledge spreads out from the focus of interest like the spokes of a wheel and we land up grasping the wonderful interconnectedness of all living things on earth. Perhaps then, and finally, we’d know our place in it.

Singing it like it is

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is P1070146.jpg — Big Sky – a lovely local South Wales Band

So yesterday I wrote about telling it like it is and today I want to extend part of that argument to the practice of song. The photo was taken in our garden in 2015 and I asked for the band – Big Sky – in the faint hope they might turn up for my leaving party …. and they did! When I said in the caption that they’re local – there’s no sense in which that could be described as damning with faint praise. They often played for our events and they were always brilliant fun; doing covers crossing decades and whole genres. People loved them and – when they knew the words – sang along with gusto.

I thought of them last night when we went to a concert at the Bath Forum. ‘Show of hands’ is doing a farewell tour for their present lineup because Miranda Sykes is leaving to work with ‘Daphne’s Flight’. The other two members, Phil Beer and Steve Knightley are going to concentrate on solo projects (they say – but don’t bet on it!). You’ll have to forgive a bit of bragging here because all three of them played separately and together in St Helen’s Church (my old gig) where we hosted a mean folk evening. Our idea of a full house was about 120, but last night the Forum was stuffed with 1000 fans. It was, Steve Knightley said, their biggest audience since they played the Albert Hall! We had some fabulous but much smaller events in the church; another supergroup, ‘Gigspanner’ did a memorable show for us. It was a special pleasure for me last night because I didn’t have to turn the building back into a church and act as general help after the concert finished. We were in bed by 1.00.

Music is just about the most life enhancing activity I know. I wore out my joke about the government banning it altogether if they knew how much fun it was – from constant repetition – and it was true every time. From carol services which were always sung in the noisiest pub style, to musicals; we lowered the religious tone to the point where anyone could connect.

Last night – if you’d looked around – you’d have seen around 1000 people and the average age must have been well over 60. Retired middle class people many of whom – like us – would have been touched by the folk revival of the 1960’s, diverse as it was, went from Bob Dylan, Joan Baez through to Sydney Carter (whose son was there last night) and the Watersons who could blast the back wall off the Bathurst Hotel (as it then was) with a single acapella chord. Show of Hands have spent decades weaving these and many other threads into pure cloth of gold.

But there was something else in the air last night. For a start, the majority of people there seemed to be superfans who knew all of the words of most of the songs and who joined in the choruses and occasionally verses of many of the songs once permission was granted (we’re talking polite middle classes here). Many of the songs and much of the linking intros had strongly political undertones. There were heaving shanties, songs of press-ganged soldiers; Cousin Jack is a powerful evocation of the toil of miners. There were several excellent jokes at the expense of the government which were noisily and rapturously cheered. The choruses were sung with such ringing audience commitment it began to feel like a revivalist meeting. One or two of the songs morphed into hymns that carried the audience into a rather different headspace but it wasn’t a religious space at all. There was a tangible longing for a temporal release from this political and economic place of suffering. I’d love to see them play at Gwennap Pit! And running through the audience was an obviously radicalized thread that you never have thought possible, looking at us all, and yet should terrify the wits out of anyone hoping to win an election.

Is there ever a moment at which you can say with certainty that change is in the air? This could have been a small portent, just as Mark Jenkins’ film ‘Bait’ is another. The point here is that creative arts can change the world by working through the imagination and the emotion. When we sing a song in a community of shared values we all derive strength and determination from it. Questions about economics and politics, housing or unemployment can be answered through Royal Commissions and legal enquiries, but mostly we don’t change our minds about the way things are around here by reading reports. Most economic and political questions turn out – on closer examination – to be cultural questions. Last night there were songs forged out of meetings with Chilean refugees from General Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Migrants always bring songs with them and we could learn so much from singing them. Folk music occupies a very distinct and happy place in our culture because it’s not high art and neither is it vacuous pop, but songs about lived experience in a world of poverty, inequality and injustice. True enough the young are more likely to find love on a dating app than wandering beside a river waiting for a tall sailor, but the challenges of trust or the tragedy of abandonment don’t change. Singing it like it is – even if the words have survived from the eighteenth century – gives us historical and geographical anchorage, and provides a fulcrum for action. In a culture that lives in a perpetual state of chaos, one point of anchorage can be the beginning of the end for a whole deranged way of life. That, I’m sure, was the elephant in the concert hall last night.

Telling it like it is

It’s our friend Charlie’s birthday today so yesterday he came round for coffee and chocolate eclairs – a birthday treat. We’re the same age bar a month, so we’ve shared lifetimes but lived them out entirely differently; he is a distinguished botanist and I was – or rather am – an undistinguished amateur. But our conversation yesterday led us to share a problem we both have with writing; because he was brought up in South Africa during the apartheid era but as a committed anti-apartheid citizen who, by force of circumstances, shared many of the material advantages of the white colonial population. How should he write about such a childhood? I have a similar problem when I write about the deprivations and occasional criminality of some of our neighbours here. Any kind of nuanced and rounded account of living in Bath has to go deeper than gushing about Roman baths, Georgian buildings and Jane Austin. Sometimes I feel that dissing the place does it a disservice, but it’s not just the local businesses that benefit from crowds of visitors; it’s a boon to the street beggars as well, and I’d bet that some of the visitors take advantage of the freely available drugs.

A few days ago I wrote a piece called “The Night Bus” which tried to capture some of the edginess and sense of threat that accompanies late night bus riders. Obviously it would be lovely and possibly earth saving if more of us left the cars at home and caught buses, but until unreliable services and antisocial behaviour get fixed, taxis and cars are a rational choice for some people who don’t share my tolerant attitude. Writing honestly about these problems is an attempt to get people – especially councillors – to do something about it.

Last year I wrote a piece about rats for the Allotment Association. It didn’t get published, probably because the editor would prefer to promote the fantasy allotments of endless pest free summer days. Sadly, in real life, winter comes along and the mice move into our polytunnel. This year they managed to nip off sixteen growing broad bean plants. Even if it’s bad Karma to set traps I’m still willing to take a chance with fate if it gets a crop in April. Gardening and allotmenteering are often challenging; with infestations and infections as well as the joyful harvest.

We’ve just had the first real frost of winter with the temperature down to -4C last night. We fleeced all of the vulnerable plants so hopefully they’ll live to grow another day; but troubles – as the small print on finance forms always mentions – “can go up as well as down”. Writing honestly about it doesn’t create problems, it brings them to the fore. If William Cobbett had confined himself to singing the praises of the beautiful Vale of Pewsey instead of writing Rural Rides, the Reform Acts might never have seen the light of day. If Charles Kingsley had not written the Water Babies, or if Charles Dickens had self censored Hard Times the cruelties of the industrial revolution might not have been exposed. If more people had wondered where the money that built Georgian Bath was coming from, maybe the slave trade would have ended that bit earlier.

Telling it how it is is radical, of course. Why do governments – particularly our own malignant bunch – spend so much time and effort prosecuting people who’ve done nothing worse than tell the truth? But telling it straight doesn’t have to be the fierce radicalism of the stereotypical demonstrator. I’ll just give one example of a conversation I overheard one Easter many years ago. We were in Regents Park Zoo standing in front of an Orangutan enclosure. A woman and her husband were there just in front of us looking at these wonderful apes with rapt attention. She turned to him and said – “Oh look George ………… they’re so realistic!” I’d be thrilled to receive any postcard sized explanations of the meaning of the word realistic in that sentence. The memory of it burrowed into my brain that day and I’ve never forgotten it. There’s a whole philosophy waiting to be unpicked when thinking about zoos and what they mean; the hole in the dam, waiting for the little boy to pull his finger out and go home for tea.

Hello stranger

In July 2020 this moth turned up on our front window. I checked it out and came to the conclusion that it was a Jersey Tiger, unaware that this would be an unusual find in North Somerset. I happened to mention this to someone much more experienced than me at identifying moths and he was adamant that I must be wrong. But I wasn’t wrong. It was one of the 30 new species that have turned up here in Bath in the past 8 years, along with Ivy Bees on our allotment and Roesel’s Bush Crickets across in Dyrham Park in large numbers. Great news you might think, but they are rather like the canaries in the coal mine giving notice of dangerous events around the corner; in this case it’s increasingly runaway global climate change. These species are not here because we are kinder to animals than we used to be, but because our climate has changed sufficiently already for them to survive here.

The reason we know they’re here is that a group of – partly amateur – volunteers have been compiling lists of sightings on Bath City Farm’s 38 acre site – 1250 species in eight years; a prodigious effort. What we don’t know quite as much about what species have disappeared, although even as I write this recorders and scientists are searching old (often handwritten) records and double checking identifications. The computerised records are then analysed to give us some idea of what’s gone. The recent BSBI 2020 Plant Atlas gives a dismaying account of lost and extinct plant species in Great Britain and Ireland. This all matters not so much because Jersey Tigers contribute £x to the economy but because we don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to about the contribution they might make to a broader conception of human flourishing. In our crazy – let’s say delusional – world, if things can’t be given a monetary value they are dismissed as unimportant and so not given priority. The car takes precedence over the wildflower meadow because you can ascribe a monetary value to it by producing some deeply dodgy statistics that prove how human thriving depends upon fast roads.

Thirty years ago we knew very little about the extraordinary contribution that fungi make to trees. Now we do know we are obliged to think harder about the desertification of millions of acres of old growth forest in favour of palm oil plantations, and the destruction of Welsh farmland so that it can be used by multinational corporations to offset their poisonous carbon emissions. I could weep at the illiteracy of the very idea of paying to pollute. I’m not against planting trees, I’m against hiding behind forestry using barefaced lies as a means of continuing to render thousands of species extinct.

Anyway here are the crickets – our grandchildren love hunting for them in the grass; and the entirely harmless Ivy Bees; all now within easy walking distance maybe just for a while as we wait for the fury to come!

Night bus

I haven’t yet got any photographs for this piece. There’s a reason. Allotments, fungus forays, natural history field trips all lend themselves to the portable memory of the mobile phone. Parties, bridges, seaside views and tractors do too, because they don’t show any signs of invaded privacy. However city streets at night or dodgy bars full of strangers – and night buses – demand a lot of street wisdom, and consequently floor the photographic brakes most of the time.

We used to love travelling and rarely felt intimidated when we wandered into the kind of places that gave us prickly feelings. “What are the chances?” we’d say to ourselves. On the station at Barcelonetta we were surrounded by a gang of muggers and once I’d made it clear that we’d fight for our cameras they decided not to take the risk. I was once advised that moving back from a threat was the wrong thing to do. “Lean into it and get in their faces”, I was told, “and although you might still get hammered they’ll more likely be intimidated themselves.” I’m sharing this information because my days of love, peace and let’s be reasonable have taught me that bullies and thugs rarely welcome a sensible discussion. As long as I get to walk away in one piece I’m content to let appearances give the false impression of fearlessness.

Anyway, last night we made one of our expeditions to Bristol which Cobbett would have recognised as a suburb of the Great Wen. We were off to an old friend’s birthday celebration in the same restaurant as we’d met in for a similar event 38 years ago. I’m not sure why Bristol enjoys such a high reputation – we both find it pretty sordid in many areas in spite of having lived and worked there for years. It’s noisy, perpetually jammed with traffic and the average age in the central areas during the day is about 25. At night, for those of a nervous disposition it’s best to keep your eyes peeled. Walking past the student hostels near the bus station the smell of weed lingers in the air, and a young woman coming back to the main door of her tower block looked anxiously around before scuttling in like a scared mouse. Nonetheless, once the initial negative impression has worn off I find it tremendously exciting. I’ve always had a thing about arriving at railway stations in places I’ve never been to and where languages are spoken that I don’t understand. Every sense is turned up to ten and it becomes a Brahmsian symphony of sounds, smells, noises, lights and unfamiliar tongues. Every kind, every nationality of food is available. Stokes Croft must have the highest variety of takeaways in the city. It’s not pretty but there’s a sense of community there

We always catch the bus into Bristol because parking is either impossibly expensive or just impossible; and we nearly didn’t make it this time because just as the bus was going down Union street, a young skateboarder slalomed into the bus at speed and the driver made an emergency stop which slammed us all into the seats in front of us. The skateboarder (with one of his lives expended) picked himself up and peered through the windscreen at the driver with a completely non judgemental look, more curiosity than WTF?!

We’d arrived at the bus station with an hour to spare, so we wandered up through the Independent Republic of Stokes Croft inspecting the graffiti which are very good and very dense – intelligent tagging. For such a diverse and alternative feeling area it had more obscurely named churches than a Welsh mining village. Getting saved would be a doddle here; far easier than in the wealthy highlands of Clifton, or the lush pastures of Southville. With time to spare we inspected the bars as we walked on, and settled on one with a big window so we could see what we were letting ourselves in for. At the bar I asked for a couple of lagers and the barman asked if I wanted glasses for them – it was that kind of bar. “Oh yes please,” I said, “I’m old you know …..I like a glass”. Next to me a young man with pinprick pupils asked me if I’d like to go mad? proffering something small and round. I said that I’d been there already and had no desire to go back and he laughed, along with the barman who could see the funny side of dealing to a man with not that much time left to abuse. This is where it all gets confusing because in spite of the slightly feral vibe, it was a very safe feeling. I often find it hard to read young people, but don’t see why they should even try to be understood. It’s their world and god knows we’ve all but ruined it for them. But the dealer was lovely with Madame and showed her where the toilets were and steered her away from the stinkiest areas – see what I mean?

So then to Picton Street which has a lifetime of memories for me because I used to buy all my radio parts from Pitts at the top, opposite the restaurant we were making for which was called Bell’s Diner at the time and is now an Italian called Bianchi’s – and very good it is too; great arancini. Among the guests was someone who spent his childhood in the street and whose family owned two shops there and he also bought bits from Pitts. We had such an animated conversation that Phil, our host, said we looked as if we’d known one another for years. Oh I do love a good party and this one was in honour of our old friend – a bit of an angel – called Ruth who once said something to me that changed the course of my life. It was so good a party, in fact, that we delayed leaving until much later than we’d intended and so, very slightly drunk, we wandered back down Picton Street just as as an imposing looking sound system was being set up. A queue had formed outside a hole in the wall fast food servery and we walked on down Jamaica Street to an almost empty bus station. There was the usual cleaner with a brush and pan sweeping up the day’s rubbish in a desultory manner. It was all quiet,

So only ten minutes later we set off in the 39 bus, but sadly the driver had not been briefed about a road closure so we waited in the canyon also known as Fairfax Street while he made a phone call to someone whose terrible stammer became something of an obstacle to planning the way out. An astoundingly drunk man got on and ricocheted from side to side up the bus to the back. Eventually we returned to the bus station but took a different route at Haymarket roundabout which must have left at least a few people waiting hopelessly in the cold at Wine Street. A few more got on, mostly tired and grey. At Temple Meads another drunk clambered into the front seat as if he were climbing Annapurna and then waved animatedly at his own reflection in the window. He was tidy and well spoken (in a more or less inebriate way) and looked as if he might have sprung unchanged from a 1930’s lodge meeting. At night the bus takes a longer route through Keynsham and the drunk man at the front asked if the bus stopped at Saltford (it does) and the driver declined to take the conversation any further.

Once we got to Keynsham the man in the front demanded to get off – he’d clearly forgotten where he was going. He stepped down from the bus and then took a wonderful tumble; bouncing harmlessly as drunks often do. The driver leapt out of the bus and helped him to his feet and he wandered off into the darkness. The bus pulled away once again and there was a loud crash behind as the other drunk fell off his seat. We stopped. The driver came up the bus and said “Oh I love my job” and reassured himself that drunk number two hadn’t done himself any serious harm. The rest of the journey was uneventful and as we got off I said to the driver that he deserved a medal. He didn’t disagree.

Home then, a glass of wine and bed; very very late – and not a single photo to illustrate our adventure. Next time perhaps …. I love catching the night bus.

Category: About the Potwell Inn

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