You probably need to come from the UK to know that “tough cheese” is the exact equivalent of “so what”, or “hard luck”. You probably need to come from Lancashire to know that Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese has been exonerated from any connection with an outbreak of e.coli. The national newspapers were all over the story that Kirkhams cheese was the next best thing to a trip to the Exit Clinic in Switzerland, but they seem to have maintained a Trappist silence over the results of the long investigation by the Food Standards Agency who tested sixty batches of Mrs Kirkhams Lancashire cheese since December 2023 and failed to find a single contaminated batch. Worse still; of 31 people infected since August, only eight said they had eaten Mrs Kirkhams and seven of those had eaten the cheese as part of a mixed plate of cheeses and charcuterie assembled by third party supermarkets. I’m indebted to the Lancashire Post for this information - and of course to my absurd attachment to local online newspapers, or at least those which aren’t entirely staffed by interns who write their stories using AI, yes I’m talking about you Reach!
Anyway, why should I be so exercised by the fate of a small dairy in Lancashire? I’ve never even eaten their cheese, although I’ll be off tomorrow to buy a piece out of solidarity. The thing is, I love cheese, and unpasteurised cheeses have an almost indefinable depth of flavour that none of the big pre-packed industrial ones have. The first time I tasted Westcombe Cheddar at the Saturday Farmers’ Market here in Bath, it felt as if I was revisiting my childhood. Yes it’s expensive but I’d rather eat a pound of Westcombe over a month than the same amount of Cathedral City in a day. It has a lingering fruity depth that I hadn’t tasted for decades. Since I found it I’ve eaten my way through dozens of hand made cheeses, many of them unpasteurised, and read books about them all. It’s an absorbing obsession.
So I was thinking today after I’d read the Lancashire Post article, that the world needs good questions more than ever before, and I’m indebted to Sid Harris, a wonderful teacher and witness at our wedding who would always challenge my flights of sociological imagination with the best question ever – “It’s all very interesting Dave, but where’s the evidence?” Where, indeed, was the evidence that shut Kirkham’s dairy down and probably very nearly destroyed their business. Who fed the story to the national press? and what vested interests kept it there for weeks? What deeply rooted prejudices against unpasteurised milk greased the flight to an assumption that the cheese was the problem? Let me tell you I’m much more frightened of shop assistants, deli’s pubs and cafe’s who couldn’t tell a HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points Plan) from a vague injunction to wash your hands now and again. I’ve just been prepping an Indian chicken dish, and I probably washed my hands a dozen times and sprayed the work surfaces twice while I was doing it – and that’s because I’ve had campylobacter twice from improperly barbecued chicken! Food safety matters, but in this instance a small business was jeopardised before the evidence was in. An immediate inspection and tests accompanied by checking all the documentation should have at least prompted a cautious response from the FSA before throwing them to the dogs.
We need to ask ourselves whether we value the work of these small artisanal producers to the local economy enough to support them or whether the authorities should always support the industrial food producers against the little people. If we’re at all serious about tackling the economic and environmental disasters that are racing up on us, then the emphasis has to be on local, low impact and low carbon (ie transport costs) with less intensive milk production.
In the US the FDA waged a war against unpasteurised artisan cheeses for years – it’s a story well told in Bronwen and Francis Percivals’ book -“Reinventing the Wheel” Over that past decade we’ve learned so much about the importance of microbes – bacteria and yeasts – in the human gut biome, that instead of being scared of so-called germs, we now embrace them and pay out exorbitant amounts of money to buy industrially produced supermarket supplements where our grandparents got them from fresh home cooked food, especially fermented preserved foods, like cheeses. Eventually the FDA backed down in the face of stolid legal persistence and now there’s a thriving artisanal cheese movement in the USA.
So Sid Harris’s question – “where’s the evidence David?” is as good as any GPS device for getting us safely to the place we need to be. Our whole culture has become infected with the deadly postmodern idea that we create our own truths and that evidence is the problem if it cuts across our prejudices. And so we trundle merrily along in a tumbril of our own making towards the cruel punishment that is waiting for us. There is time to change our ways; but not much of it!
It would be nice to be able to believe that the story of Bladud – the mythical king who founded Bath after noticing his rather scabby pigs liked to roll in the black mud of the heated swamp that was once all that existed of the Georgian/Roman/1960’s redevelopment horror – was so fanciful that no-one, not even a PR consultant, would ever come up with such a fanciful story again. Such people still exist in droves as hack journalists and are only too happy to use Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 11th century yarn to attract visitors/shoppers to the City. Naturally they’re not coming for the black mud any more, and leprosy has dropped off the radar for the well-to-do; but they are coming to experience the rather confusing melange of Roman Bath and Jane Austin’s Bath alongside a bit of shopping and more chain restaurants than you could shake a stick at. We don’t mention slavery except perhaps to mention the brave attempts to abolish it. Kingsmead doesn’t feature much in the story because it was heavily bombed in error by enemy pilots during the war who were using an old version of Google Maps and missed the Abbey and the Admiralty offices by a quarter of a mile. Kingsmead has always had a bit of a reputation which it clings to even after the loss of the medieval brothels, stinking dye works and unruly drinking dens. We’ve had two stabbings, and a drugs arrest since we got back from Cornwall on Monday. Bladud, just to clarify things, was not a Georgian builder and had no hand in building the rather lovely terrace that bears his name. But hey! truth is whatever you want it to be and if you’d like to believe that the Bell Inn on Walcot Street was landlorded in the sixth century BCE by King Lear (Bladud’s Son) be my guest. You’ll be working for the Conservative government in no time.
Sorry, honestly, for that little eruption of bile, but living in the gulf between what we experience every day and how the media chooses to report it is depressing and debilitating in every way. However back to ghost signs, and the one in the photo was only uncovered in July of last year, and all credit to the owners who understood that historical relics like this are a marvellous reminder of the real life of the City in the past. Actually there are two signs, and the one underneath can be dated to around 1847. You can check it out on the Akeman Press website run by Andrew Swift, the author of some of the best historical guides to Bath. We ordered one of his books online and they delivered it by hand!
These ghostly remains are a powerful reminder that we don’t live exclusively in the present, whatever the therapists may tell us; we really can be in two places, or two centuries at once, and that experience can be profoundly important. Seeing and touching the insignificant artifacts of the past stretches the imagination and informs a kind of empathy with the challenging and different cultures of the past. I was once asked if I was a member of the “Somerset Poles”. I assumed that the question referred to the direct descendants of Margaret Pole, 15th Century Countess of Salisbury, and for all I know I could be. What I didn’t realize until last year, was that there are many more people with my surname living in places like South Stoke than I’d ever known about. There are family stories about my dad going to visit to old aunts “somewhere near Cheddar” who were part of my great grandmother’s family; so yes I probably am a Somerset Pole but I harbour no delusional thoughts about living in one of those grand Georgian houses. My first thought on seeing those ghostly signs was to imagine myself driving a small cart down the street, collecting urine for the dye works. I’m really not gentleman material.
The signs also remind me that I won’t be here forever. Andrew Swift suggests that an early owner of the building would have been the surgeon and apothecary William John Church. Where is he buried? who knows? There are no surviving grateful patients or litigious failures to ask and in any case he moved on when the eye infirmary set up shop. I can close my eyes and imagine well heeled patients entering and leaving through that very door. People began coming to Bath in Georgian times because they were often sick and believed that the sulphurous waters could make them well. Later, when it became fashionable, there’s no doubt that some of the visitors could have been found in the brothels of Kingsmead and up the London Road.
Bath has an incredible abundance of ghost signs and most visitors hurry past without looking up at them but for me they’re better than all the carefully curated signage. Dog food, engine oil, eye infirmaries, dairies, cafes; in fact all the everyday stuff tells us more about Bath than the glossiest shop window. When I was a child and we caught the bus into Bristol, I was always intrigued by a sign above a fairly grubbly looking shop front in Old Market. It announced “Ace Erections” by way of a curly neon tube in red. I always thought it was a building company!
I’ve already written about our hasty decision to rent a cottage on The Lizard because we were both suffering from post COVID tristesse. We calculated – as we always do – what was the cheapest week we could get before the price doubles at Easter, and a phone call sealed the deal. After weeks and weeks of continuous rain and three weeks of COVID symptoms we were desperate to take advantage of what promised to be a dry week with occasional sunshine. Both of those qualities were abundant here but sadly we also had wickedly strong north-easterly winds which kept the temperature down to 4C but felt more like freezing. Cold enough to take your face off even with three layers of clothes, beanies and mittens. I don’t think we’ve ever known it colder here – as far South as it’s possible to be on mainland Britain. Still lovely as ever but the usually reliable signs of spring seem to have been stopped in their tracks.
My initial aim was to check out a pond. Here it is. Last year I’d come to believe that I’d failed to spot a little plant called Spring Quillwort – Isoetes echinospora – which sheds its fronds in the winter. It turned out I was wrong because if I’d taken the trouble to check I’d have seen that it’s never been recorded on the Lizard. Anyway one thing led to another and I discovered that there is another, even rarer, member of the same family which does grow here and attracts visiting botanists from all over the world. It’s an odd plant that grows in impoverished soil in temporary puddles during the winter and, in order to survive the constant drought, dies back in early summer. Our first expedition was compromised by sheer driving wind, but I managed to narrow our find down to one of two species and then decided to send a photo to the local Vice County Recorder for his opinion. He was right – I was wrong and it was Spring Squill but he’s a very encouraging kind of man and sent me a detailed map of where I could find the real deal. Short of coming and holding my hand he couldn’t have been more helpful.
So on Tuesday afternoon we set out once again, map in hand in the fierce wind to a place close to the car park to search again. They weren’t there but it’s a bit early in the year anyway. What we did notice was an enormous gorse fire running apparently out of control and very close to another potential group of plants. Cue for a strong email to the National Trust asking why on earth they were burning gorse so close to a nationally important site. To their credit the project manager emailed me back within the hour explaining what they were doing and describing “controlled burning” as one among many controls that were being trialled on the Lizard, to improve the life chances of around 20 nationally important species. “That’s great” – I thought, but the word controlled is a bit of a tricky one. You can control everything up to the point where you apply the match to the tinder but thereafter the wind will take over and from where we were standing it looked as if the flames were twenty feet into the air and travelling at speed in the direction of the footpath where the rare plants had a foothold. They wouldn’t have had the ghost of a chance of stopping it, if it got sufficiently close to the path to cause damage. Fire and flood are two of nature’s gifts that do not allow negotiation.
The project manager said that he had been present and he didn’t think it was out of control, but conceded that we might have had a better view of it. He also said that the burning had been carried out by contractors. From a contractor’s point of view a strong northeasterly, driving the fire towards the cliff would have done the job quickly and efficiently – which would have been fine if the purpose of the burning was merely to clear the ground of gorse. But the true purpose of the burn was to create a better environment for the rare plants and therefore speed and efficiency were – or should have been – subsidiary to their preservation!
My other objection would be the sheer amount of particulate (PM 2.5) matter released into the atmosphere along with Co2 and all the other noxious substances that bonfires emit, plus the release of phosphate and potash from ash into what needs to remain impoverished soil. Against that you might argue that if the contractors had waited for a southwesterly which would have taken the direction of travel of the fire away from the cliffs; Lizard village would have been inundated with choking smoke – so maybe cutting the gorse back would have been a more expensive, slower but greener alternative.
So after smoke – which we know to be a component of climate heating and lung disease – there comes ash, which is quite alkaline, quite mobile, and known to be fairly soluble in some cases; plus all of the the accumulated trace elements which – depending on the heat of the fire – can also be released. There’s an abundance of science on all this and it seems wise to err on the side of caution when it comes to these highly vulnerable sites. It’s never a good idea to let the perfect drive out the good but sometimes we need to look for a better kind of good.
Obviously, fire and overwintering insects aren’t a good mix. In a world of reliable abundance maybe the loss of a population of insects would be soon repaired. Eggs and pupae can’t get out of the way. The Project Manager wrote that expert surveys had been carried out before the policy had been adopted, but there is no denying the impact on insects and many species of bee overwintering in the earth beneath the gorse; and finally, Gorse, which flowers the year round, is a useful source of nectar at a time when there’s nothing much else around.
Now I have the greatest of respect for the National Trust and for Natural England and I’m quite sure that a good deal of discussion was expended on the variables in all this, but “The best laid plans of mice and men” …… etc are always liable to be upended by the facts on the ground, and a little humility, when the plan literally turns to dust and ashes, goes a long way. Nature conservation demands a fleet footed and occasionally improvisational approach and the problems come thick and fast when institutional inertia gets in the way. If this is an experimental project this may be a time when one part of it should be abandoned in the light of events.
First list of the year
We come down here most years for a break – usually around three weeks later than this year so we can look for spring plants.As the years go by it’s more like checking out on old friends; but there’s more than an element of looking for signs of spring – like fields of flowering daffodils near Culdrose, as they are this year. But the weeks of rain followed by this extreme cold snap has certainly held things back. I’ve come to appreciate the exuberant beauty of plants as they burst through the soil. The rosettes of Wild Radish leaves are probably as lovely as the plant gets, for instance. In particular we were looking for some small populations of Babington’s Leek that we’d recorded for the first time last year, and a wireplant that must have travelled from New Zealand via the isles of Scilly; both of which were in or near the ruined serpentine works at Poltesco. So we parked the car at Ruan Minor and set off down the steep valley, past a restored but apparently abandoned water mill and on to the ruined mill on the sea shore. What’s not to like? industrial ruins and rare plants – paradise.
So with the two boxes ticked we also looked for plants in flower and found twelve.
Celandine
Winter Heliotrope
Hogweed (unexpectedly)
Perennial Sowthistle
Dandelion
Ivy Leaved Toadflax (white form)
Primrose
Snowdrop
Violet
Red Campion
Gorse
Daisy
Admittedly we’re talking about single specimens in some cases, but that’ll do for a harbinger of better times, we need some good news. I’m not sleeping well and tormented by dreams of violence. Last night I dreamed about children in a war zone. I won’t bother you with the details. Here are some pictures of the mill and some of the plants, taken by Madame.
Postscript
The gorse burning has continued for several days, with the Fire Brigade called out at least once. Photographs on social media on Sunday showed that the plume of smoke could be seen from Penzance. It seems to me that in an age when we’re thinking twice about wood burning stoves and garden bonfires, it’s a bit rich when a state sponsored organisation (Natural England) is burning acres of gorse for any reason at all. It may be perfectly legal, but that doesn’t mean it’s sensible or ethical. One obvious possible solution is to cut the gorse back, shred it on site to reduce the volume and then compost it and/or use it for mulch. More expensive? Well who’s paying the bill for the environmental cost of the fires?
The view through the window of the marvellous cafe at Kynance Cove
Years ago we were on the Roseland peninsula, skulking along the coast path when we spotted a botanist. We knew she was a botanist because she was in the classic field botanist’s question mark pose – head bent over, walking very slowly and scanning from side to side like a faulty photocopier. “What are you looking for?” I asked. I should admit immediately that I’m quite deaf because I clearly heard her say “squirrels”. A conversation of stacking non sequiturs concerning little furry animals followed for a while when it finally dawned on me that she was looking for Spring Squills – Scilla verna – for the serious, and I was able to purge my imagination of the possibility of a colony of Red Squirrels living under the radar in Cornwall. However it was worth the embarrassment because I’d never seen a Spring Squill and then suddenly we knew where to find them. Now, of course, I wave a languid arm at them and say in my best Martin Jarvis/ Just William voice – “Oh them’s Spring Squirrels” whilst inwardly plotting terrible revenge on Violet Elizabeth Bott. If you’re interested, they grow profusely behind the coastguard lookout east of Portscatho and – what’s more – all the way around the Lizard coastline.
Anyway, the Spring Squill was the cause of even more confusion today, because we set out to find not just any old pond, but the precise pond in which I had come to believe I’d failed to identify a pretty rare plant last January. Needless to say I was wrong in every respect because once we got back with grid references and photographs and then defrosted our hands I waded through my pile of books and found that my hoped-for rarity had never been found anywhere near the Lizard but that there was another proper rarity growing down here that I also thought we had seen today.
It wasn’t the best day for a minute examination of the local flora. The gunmetal grey sky and a nominal temperature of 4C hardly describe the reality when you factor in the 20 mph east windchill. We were heads down all the way, and even with my new heavyweight oiled Welsh wool polo neck, two hats and a down jacket, we were very cold. Thank goodness for the cafe at the bottom which was open and selling tea and toasted buns.
Anyway, it turns out that Land Quillwort which does grow here is all but indistinguishable, at this time of year, from guess what? ……. Spring Squill- oh bother!! Now the Quillwort is so rare that you can’t just go uprooting bits of it, so the only way to see what it is would be to revisit in March and see what’s come up. This is how we amateurs go completely bonkers and land up with gimlet eyes and strange personal habits. I could cite the authorities I’ve consulted but this isn’t meant to be a student essay as much as a cri de coeur from a bewildered man.
But why’s this so much fun? Well you’d have to talk to a psychotherapist I’m afraid, but sitting here surrounded by photos, grid references and field guides I feel completely at home and in my happy place. No peculiar tics any more, I’ve been pretty successful at hiding them. Tomorrow there’s a possibility of snow which, in this part of Cornwall is a rarity. If I could offer just one suggestion as to why this is so rewarding, maybe it’s this. When you get to a certain age you become invisible. Even your children begin to see signs of senescence everywhere and turn away offers of advice or help, occasionally rather rudely. But then, as it happened today, emails arrive from older friends and younger people with real heft asking you to do something; a bit of proofreading maybe. Plans are laid for field trips which will go ahead because we – The Three Musketeers – will go out on a recce and we can make them happen; and you can ask questions of world class experts and get them answered and you feel useful. And if you should think that this is all nonsense then ponder this. The 202o UK and Ireland BSBI Plant Atlas is the result of as many as 170,000 volunteer days of recording. If you read anything in the newspapers that refers to plants and their current state in the midst of a climate catastrophe it will almost certainly come from this data. We oldies still have our uses!
I was just adding up and I’m pretty sure our first visit to the Lizard would have been in 1969 while we were at Falmouth Art School. It must have made an impression because when we moved to Bath Academy of Art in Corsham we went back for three weeks, camping in a heavy cotton tent on a farm for 50p a night with access to an outdoor toilet and a cold tap in the corner of the farm garden for washing. The farmer was an amazingly good looking young man with blond curls who was experimenting with milking three times a day. We quickly got through the small amount of money I’d earned as a temporary groundsman and I had to phone my sister for some additional funds. The journey down began with a car drive to Penryn with a friend who was visiting her brother and then after an overnight stay we caught a series of buses beginning outside the Methodist Chapel where they were singing in tongues so loudly you could hear it through the three foot granite walls. We finally arrived in Lizard hours later, just in time for a snack in the Regent Cafe on the green (still there). For some reason I’d brought my little portable Remington and a coffee percolator (I didn’t type a word the whole time we were there!), and everything we needed was packed into two rucksacks; mine was so tall I could barely lean to one side without toppling.
I was determined to walk across to Kynance Cove to camp, but I was equally determined to navigate across the most direct route rather than follow the coast path. On sober reflection and more than fifty years later I understand that every mark on an OS map has a meaning. Not least the little wavy blue lines that signify some very rough and waterlogged ground. I had no idea then what botanical treasures we were stumbling across. We finally made it across Lizard Down in the dark having scrambled down and up the precipitous sides of a valley quite unnecessarily and erected the little yellow tent on the first bit of flattish and dryish ground we could find. In the morning Madame went for a wee behind a rock, having barely slept a wink for fear of being inundated by the sea which – although it was noisy, was 100 feet below us – only to be approached by a phalanx of bemused walkers. We’d pitched the tent in the middle of the coast path. Words were spoken and we packed up and walked the coast path back to Lizard.
The three weeks were blissfully hot and we walked and sunbathed all day, discovering the small villages, eating at the cafe when we got back from our explorations and drinking at the pub in the evening. On one occasion I tried to drink every whisky on the bar while Madame had her first taste of brandy and Babycham. It didn’t end well and I banged my head on a farm shed lintel so hard that I saw stars. On other evenings we really did see stars; millions of them.
This was the holiday we discovered Cadgwith. We stopped off in Ruan Minor and found a little pop up cafe doing cream teas in the garden, and then we walked on down to the Cove and – although I couldn’t swear to it – I think we probably bought fresh crab. Cornwall had been a revelation to us; both of us born and brought up in Bristol and, for the first time, seeing Dracaenas, (which were Palm Trees as far as we were concerned), growing everywhere. The sea there, after the familiar mud soaked grey brown of the Bristol Channel, was a miraculous blue. It was there I discovered the name of the exotic looking clifftop weed called Kaffir Fig. It was there too that we saw the last few Choughs eking out a living before becoming extinct for several decades. Intensive farming and chemical cattle drenches finally did for them and almost did for the Ravens too. It was there that two intertwining threads were born in us; a passion for natural history and a passion for this extraordinary part of Cornwall.
When we go back anywhere along that coast, the first thing I do is take in a great draught of the air; of the sea, the grass, the cowpats in the fields – not the ammoniac stench of huge silos but crusting there on the grass for flies to lay eggs which hatch into maggots which in turn feed the Choughs. The second thing I do is to pause and listen to the sea, the wind and then the birds. Jackdaws, Choughs, Rooks, Crows, Magpies and even Ravens if you’re lucky – they’re all such voluble chatterboxes. The Lizard is known as a botanical hotspot which, translated, means there are so many plants I don’t recognize and can’t name, that I exist with a permanently cricked neck and spend the evenings poring over books and photos. I’m a slow learner.
Then for some reason we stopped going there. It felt overrun with tourists not like us, and the ambivalence of the Cornish towards us was occasionally hard to bear. Too many Tarquins and Cressidas; too many labradors; too many wannabe sailors and posh wetsuits; too much Guinea Fowl and too many places we could no longer afford to eat; too many times being ignored in the bar whilst the barking classes sharp elbowed their way to the front.
We eventually had three boys and for most of the time life was a struggle but we found a wonderful and cheap campsite in the extreme west of Wales with amazing beaches that you could only access on foot after a long walk; and where we could go skinny dipping if we felt like it and build driftwood bonfires on the sand. The boys were happy there and soon found friends among the AT (alternative type) campers. It was like Totnes by the sea. On one occasion one of the other parents asked us if it was really true that we cleaned our teeth with twigs – the boys had rather exaggerated our commitment to low impact living.
I was learning plants more quickly by this time – making long lists of them as we walked down the lanes, whilst barely keeping my head above water at work. There were several occasions when I drove back home – a 300 mile round trip – to take a funeral in the middle of a holiday. I always felt responsible, but we survived the worst that a few of the church congregation felt entitled to throw at us and gradually they left to attend other churches where the vicar was more malleable and would do as they were told. Pastoral care for us was a joke, because the bishops felt threatened by therapeutic groups that might reveal abuse and bullying in the Church of England.
One lovely summer we took three weeks off and went camping in West Wales and by the end I felt like a wildly excited dog, charging around the field. I think that was when I realized that some jobs will crush the life out of you if you let them. There was me preaching about life in all its fullness and slowly fading away myself. That summer I let my beard grow and when we got back one of the congregation told me I looked frightening. I felt that was a good start.
But what about Cornwall? One summer after the boys had left home and we were both working full time we’d arranged and paid for a holiday in the South of France and needed to hire a car which you can’t do without a credit card. That’s so the hire company can remove hundreds of pounds from your account without asking you, on the spurious grounds that you didn’t refill the tank until the fuel ran over your shoes. Anyway, the credit card never arrived, the holiday and our money were lost and three weeks later the bank rang to say that they’d found the card in a drawer in the office. No word of apology or any offer of compensation. Madame was devastated and I felt responsible but she immediately started searching for a new holiday. Needless to say looking for a campsite in August is tricky but she stumbled on a long established campsite in Cornwall that had just changed hands, which had led to a bit of a boycott by the longstanding patrons. So we were in, and found our Cornish heaven again. We’d had a couple of damp squibs in the intervening years. One cottage near St Ives, owned by another vicar, turned out to have walls running with damp and squatting in a sea of mud. The tenants on the farm looked terrifyingly inbred and we drove straight home again before the banjos and shotguns came out.
The new campsite on the Roseland Peninsula was everything we needed and had its own microclimate with its own flora. But working eighty hours a week precludes any serious botanising apart from a few short holidays and so we had to wait until we both retired and moved to Bath before we could settle to some serious plant hunting. Nowadays we alternate between the Lizard, Portscatho and the Llyn peninsula for longer breaks and do local field trips with the Bath Nats where there are abundantly qualified members to help us identify plants and fungi, even insects sometimes.
Cornwall is a difficult place to get your head around. I’ve often written about my attraction to post-industrial landscapes, which the county offers in abundance. There’s barely a square mile that hasn’t been dug up, turned over and mined. A century later it all looks like a film set; ferns growing tastefully from the crumbling pitheads against the pyramid backdrop of china clay spoil heaps; footpaths glistening with mica flakes; cliffs stained blue and green with copper and arsenic leaking from flooded mine adits.
And then there are the fishing villages. Hardly anyone outside the big ports like Newlyn and Penzance goes fishing any more, apart from a few small day boats after mackerel, crab and lobster to sell through the back door – but the fishing myth persists in a miasma of half remembered better days. It’s kept alive because we all need it to be kept alive. What cottage or pub connects better with the imaginary past than the one with a few coloured glass floats and a brass barometer on the wall? In the winter the pretty villages empty out and go dark. Village schools, churches and shops close every year as the locals move to damp and poorly maintained rentals inland.
But we go back like lemmings to the edge of the sea every summer because we need to feed some remote part of the soul that can’t be fed anywhere else. We take our own soul food; a few folk songs, remembered paintings, some Leach pottery maybe – because the essence of twenty first century life; the high wall that keep us chained to neoliberal stupidity is the constant erosion of historical memory. Memories of the real past, like languages don’t just wither away, they’re deliberately suppressed and the resulting holes are filled with the polystyrene foam of costume drama on TV. Cornwall is Poldark; Poldark is Cornwall. Believe what you like! Truth is so last year! A bit of wrecking or piracy or smuggling is OK, after all it’s only a film!
I suppose for a botanist, even a very amateur one like me, it would be simpler to ignore all that stuff and just enjoy the plant life. But there is a live interface between, for instance, unemployment and a dirty industry like lithium mining. Polluted land might provide a niche interest for people like me, but it’s polluted all the same. In West Penwith there’s a battle raging between Natural England and some of the local farmers. There are about 3000 hectares of moor and downland that constitute one of the largest semi natural sites in the country. We’ve walked the footpaths there for years. But nutrient enrichment and changed land use towards intensive farming is slowly destroying the habitat. There’s more heat than light in the debate because the farmers will be compensated for any effect on their income, but there’s no doubt that the way of life they’ve become accustomed to for – say – fifty years, will have to change. That’s a toughie because a fifth generation farmer didn’t sign up to become a nature warden and very properly wants a bit more flesh on the bones of how it’s all going to work. The problem is, organic change is very slow and incremental but the environmental crisis is more akin to a tsunami. There’s no time for a generational change and some farmers there find it threatening and oppressive to be told their traditional way of life is less important than a tiny plant or a spider.
The Cornish, like most threatened communities, have become defensive and suspicious of the government. The fishing industry has been hammered by brexit whilst simultaneously overfishing because you have to make hay while the sun’s shining. Lack of housing is a huge source of anger – it goes on. Tourism is a constant irritant; there are too many buy to lets and airBnb’s and, just as with the tin mining, much of the money is exported to the wealthier parts of the UK.
And yet ……. and yet, when the beach side building that houses fishing gear in Cadgwith came onto the market, threatening the livelihood of the last few fishing boats, the local community launched an appeal which was supported by people all over the country and the building was saved.
When we are there my greatest joy is to stand at the kitchen door of our rented National Trust cottage – in truth an otherwise derelict cattle shed – and absorb the smell and plangent sound of the sea against the rocks below. I don’t need to own it, or control it in any way. The thought of it just being there is a sustaining one when the going gets tough in Bath. A week is all it takes to fill the tank, and we’ll come home with dozens of photographs and maybe identify some never seen before (by us) plants, oh and we’ll eat fresh fish from the fishmonger in Porthleven, drink wine, sleep like innocents and feel the life running through our veins.
If there is a solution to the conundrum to the disconnect between real Cornwall and the competing fantasy versions, it will surely include tourists like us; but let’s make it sustainable tourism, buying locally to support small businesses, parking thoughtfully without blocking the lanes and respecting those who live there the year round. Let’s support any initiatives to bring sustainable non-polluting green jobs to the county and behave like ethical grownups!
I noticed in one of the dafter end newspapers – or slush comics as my Grandfather used to call them – that a woman was predicting next year’s election results by consulting some asparagus. While I’m not an enemy of innovation, I think that in this case she’s gone a step too far. Asparagus is notoriously unreliable for predictions of this nature and nothing will shake me in my conviction that if you’re trying to predict the weather or discover whether rich uncle Barry will see the night out, your truest, most reliable guide is a a bit of seaweed. Hung under the rafters, it will also protect you from marauding sea elephants with 100% success.
There’s no secret to predicting the future. You just need to think about the present; place the piece of seaweed in a warm saucer of freshly collected seawater and take a deep breath; inbreathing its healing, slightly rotten fishy, sewage, perfume and exhaling – if at all possible without gagging. Then all you need to do is repeat hum de ha, hum de ho in a low and thoughtful manner and let the future flood into your mind; a spring tide of effluent and used condoms.
Alternatively you could read the newspapers or – as in my case - ask around. New Year’s Eve is possibly not the best time to ask the Potwell Inn regulars what’s going to happen because by 22.30 most of them won’t remember their names. So here, in stone cold sobriety, are a few of mine. The first few come as hybrids between resolutions and predictions, but I console myself with the knowledge that hybrids are often extremely vigorous.
The Potwell Inn has already made it to 1000 posts
We will reach 1000,000 (one million) words in 2024 – by my calculation in 41 weeks if I carry on writing at the same rate. However if I achieve the next objective it could be sooner.
So 205 average sized posts would get me there – and I could be home by the Winter Solstice or –
I could increase the length or frequency of posting and get there by the Autumn Equinox
Which all feeds into a conviction that I should be writing in longer form; not Lord of the Rings, but short story length – maybe 2,500 words, which will take some practice and patience (especially on Madame’s part) because they’ll each take between two and a half and three hours to write. I remember the story of a world famous golfer who was told by an admirer that he was incredibly lucky to be so gifted and replied that it was odd, but the more he practiced the luckier he seemed to get. Blogging – however unfashionable it may be these days – is hard work and it relies on having a real and full life outside the froth of narcissism that afflicts so many would be influencers. So many blogs with the germ of a good idea crash and burn within a year because the writer has nothing to say. The best advice I could give is to work hard and treat youth and beauty as just a phase you’re passing through. So, dear readers, I hope you’ll hang on through the inevitable turbulence of me doing something new. The one thing I can promise is that the Potwell Inn will be at the heart of it all.
But enough of that navel gazing. What is the seaweed saying about next year? Inevitably these are UK predictions because seaweed works on ultra high frequency and without kryptonite repeater stations on tiny islands it doesn’t do intercontinental predictions. I think that Labour will win the General Election which will be in May, but I also think the majority will be much smaller than they hope because they haven’t, so far, come up with any decent ideas. I very much hope that the Greens can win a few more seats and that the Tories will be routed. I would then set the present Cabinet to work as couriers, Deliveroo drivers and Amazon workers. Those refusing would be set to dig coal with their bare hands for 90 hours a week, carry it across the top of a mountain in unwieldy baskets and then tip it down a redundant shaft. When the second shaft was full the process would be reversed. I think this could work even better than my previous plan to force them to perform a live re-enactment of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais statue, outside parliament, with free rotten fruit funded by inheritance tax rises.
As a corollary to the above I predict that Green issues will begin, at last, to come to the fore and that the demand for SUV’s will begin to fall because they will evoke shame and disgust rather than envy. There may also be a sudden increase in lentil sales and that packets will have to be marked for food use only!
The Metropolitan Police will have to intervene to stop violent disorder between the thirteen Tory family factions that emerge from the general election and then they will arrest one another en masse for being horrible. Eton, Harrow and Westminster Schools will finally realize their destiny and become approved schools for the delinquent children of ultra processed food millionaires. Keir Starmer will refer the whole mess to a public enquiry chaired by Dominic Cummings.
Enough, enough! It’s been a horrible year and we’ve had COVID twice and I only have to see a newsreader on TV to have an AF attack. . Everything that we once treasured is being trashed by a government that behaves like a bunch of teenagers on a post GCSE holiday in Rock (that’s a bit subtle I know) and we just want a bit of hope; something to cling to that suggests that the great ship of state has finally grounded itself on the reef called reality; a metaphor worthy of the great Humphrey Littleton, I think. What’s left except to have a drink or three tonight and wish one another a happy new year without crossing our fingers behind our backs for the first time in over a decade.
”I don’t feel comfortable hanging around here. Shall we buy some food and eat in the car? We can pull over once we get out of Thornbury.’
‘OK, as long as there’s plenty of food.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Robin, switching on the engine, ‘I remember your theory that nothing eaten on a car journey contains calories.’ ‘Exactly. Got to make the most of these opportunities.’
So they purchased food on the High Street, got back into the Land Rover and headed out of Thornbury. After five minutes , Strike said, ‘This’ll do. Pull in by that church.’
Robin turned up Greenhill Road and parked beside the graveyard. ‘You got pork pies?’ said Robin, looking into the bag. ‘Problem?’ ‘Not at all. Just wishing I’d brought biscuits in the first place.’
“The Running Grave” JK Galbraith
Normally/usually – [can’t make up my mind which is the better word] – when I categorize a post as “Potwell Inn Library”, it’s because I’ve liked a book I have just bought and read. In this case it isn’t true because I haven’t yet read “The Running Grave”, the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike series. My son sent a photograph of a single page and said I should read it. For reference it’s page 703 according to the photo. Madame, having seen the photo ordered the book immediately so I’ll get to read it eventually I’m sure.
I have no idea whether the location of this little scene crops up before or again in the book; it just went off like a Chinese Cracker in my mind because unusually for a detective novel, I was able to locate the exact place to an eight figure British National Grid reference. Rowling certainly does her research thoroughly, whether by picking random place names from maps, or by actually noting them down in person. I suppose she might have stayed at Thornbury Castle, bought the pies at Riddifords (the inspiration for the TV programme “Open all hours”), and driven up Thornbury hill turning right at the traffic lights and passing the church on her right hand after the playing field. The single error in the description is that you couldn’t (or shouldn’t) turn right into Greenhill in order to swing around the green and park next to the graveyard. Or maybe she recorded that tiny detail before the one way system was put in place maybe twenty or so years ago.
How do I know this? Well because the church in question was where I was Vicar for 25 years. The graveyard was full of familiar names; people I knew and those I knew about. I knew about the oldest occupant who died at 104 years old. His father had fallen off the wooden scaffolding and broke his leg when the church was being built. The family were all builders, quarrymen and masons and many still live in the village today. At his funeral the church was unusually packed for a person of such great age, and I had several wonderful conversations – one with a cider maker who would hoax the Customs and Excise by concealing his produce, which always exceeded the limit, by hiding the large 1000 litre barrels in the hedges.
Novelists and parish priests have entirely different modus operandi. Novelists, especially the good ones like Galbraith, gather sufficient detail to make their narrative believable. My job was to know as much as was humanly possible about the people I worked with, so that, (as I would occasionally confess to their grieving relatives) I knew where the bombs were buried. There are always bombs, landmines, secrets and evasions. People would sometimes say to me after a funeral – you sounded as if you knew him really well! – ‘oh yes I did! I’d think to myself’ and there are always ways of expressing people without revealing any secrets. Unlike one funeral where a son gave the address and said at the beginning that “my father was a good friend to most of the lonely women in the parish”.
That brief paragraph in the Strike story embraced a tiny patch of my parish in which lives were lived and occasionally wasted. In that couple of roads resided the echoes of real murders, of violent attacks, of incest, of betrayals and redemptions, of drug dealing. Over a period of 25 years I became the village Sin Eater and keeper of the secrets and the histories of the family feuds which stretched back over seventy years and hinged on such tiny details as who was driving the motorcycle and who precisely abandoned whom on the stone bridge at Berkeley. Did the village funeral director really turn his car over as a young man, while speeding down Thornbury High Street. It’s the novelist’s job to construct plausible narratives from the fragments of everyday life. It’s all very tidy and comforting to end a novel with each piece in place. Characters come, say their piece and often disappear again to live their fragmentary lives because real lives don’t resolve out like musical keys. Real lives don’t end with a triumphal modulation from minor to major – a modulation which Bryn, my first piano teacher would always describe as a “Curse de Picardy”. Real lives sputter and glow, flare out and turn to ash. I once married a couple on Saturday and buried their stillborn baby less than two weeks later. There are no words for that.
People often say I should write this stuff down – well I suppose that’s what I’m doing now. I love the Galbraith stories and I’d love to have her gift of cabinet-making the scenes together into a perfect narrative. But I’m more of a carpenter, like my Grandfather. My tools are the ripsaw and the nail. No hidden dovetails and Rosewood veneer for me, but a rough plank of Elm with a few scribbled pencil research notes on the side.
At the end of my incumbency I was approached on the street by a young man who asked me – “are you still Rev Dave?” ”Still Rev Dave!” I replied and wondered whether I would ever find a way to tell the stories.
Christmas is done. The dread gap between the Winter Solstice and New Year has not been fractured (yet) by family disputes, old rivalries or half-buried resentments. No tremendous hangovers; no mountains of leftover food – which was all boxed up and distributed to those who couldn’t eat it on the day and no incriminating photos posted online. Let’s call it a tremendous success which always comes at the price of relentlessly patrolling the ramparts. Like wartime firewatchers we attempt to locate the incendiary remarks before they ignite, and we lob them over the wall avoiding my sherry trifle whose pendulum had swung to the deadly end of the spectrum. Everything except the gammon stock was good but unfortunately I forgot to turn the heat down whilst reducing it and didn’t notice until three fire alarms went off. The resulting charred mess took three days to remove but the pan is now gleaming. So – as my old boss used to say – when he had no idea what to say – well there we are.
I suppose I should mention that our celebrations were compromised by the fact that we were both recovering from COVID. Second time this year and ameliorated if not prevented by our jabs. So there was a good deal of coughing and spluttering going on although we were not – according to the test – actually infectious. A bit snippy maybe!
Christmas – I think we’re supposed to say – is a family time; a time of celebration. Well yes, but it’s still exhausting and emotionally draining. Most of the time we don’t waste that much energy on expecting the best of everyone, we just accept that things will probably be a bit shit but we’ll muddle through like we always do. Sharing loos and showers; negotiating the choice of TV programmes and getting the washing up done are the banana skins of family life. You can’t wish a personality change on another human being and even middle aged ‘boys’ seem to revert to an early teen mindset. Last night after the last wave of the last hand with rictus damaged smiles we fell into bed only for me to wake again an hour later with battery acid reflux. It was dark, overcast and raining by morning and even the trees outside were wrapped in a coat of shining slime. Something had to be done.
Thanks to the global climate catastrophe – the named storms are coming three at a time and the high temperature record was once again being broken over the festival season and the weather feels ugly and depressing. The allotment, being at the bottom of a hilly site with a stream running underground through our apple trees, is all but inaccessible. There are daylight, temperature and weather processes that are essential to the wellbeing of perennial plants like apples; but disrupted as they are, the growing of crops is becoming more like a lottery.
So while I cleaned the oven and descaled the steam function; then put the dishwasher on a cleaning cycle and made strong coffee; Madame went back to bed and worked silently on her tablet for half an hour while I cleaned up the crime scene. When she eventually shouted “Come here” in her most imperious voice I responded immediately and she said “the cottage in Cadgwith is free” – (but still not cheap, I thought), while my heart leapt for joy and my soul sang in their hearty and soulful fashion. With £150 discount it still wasn’t really cheap but it was below the inexcusably extravagant line, so after ten seconds deliberation we booked it for a week. Photos from the kitchen door at the top of this post.
Our most extravagant moment almost escaped our attention entirely. One of the boys brought a bottle of wine and I could tell it was a good one just by looking at the label. I said it looked good and he said “It should be at that price!” All unknowing I opened it and took a sip and it was wonderful – I mean symphonic. Madame was having a dry night so I managed to drink about three quarters of the bottle before caution and generosity compelled me to stop. Only then, after I had a sneaky look online did I discover just how good it was. Oh and expensive too. It may well turn out to be the most expensive wine I’ll ever drink. Madame finished it up the next day and agreed that it was very good. I’m glad I didn’t know its value before I tried it. I’ve often wondered whether the whole wine connoisseur thing was a snobbish affectation but on the basis of a blind tasting there was no doubt.
And so, back to my favourite place on earth to look for plants and ferns and especially a Quillwort that I managed to walk past without recognising last year. It will be a tremendous place for a bit of spiritual renewal – it always is!
Unexpected visitors never bring much joy, and a vicarage is the first place many truffle stuffed crises make their landfall. We were on the main road to a spike (an overnight hostel) and in those days we weren’t seeing as many drug users as now. Mostly we saw old style tramps who’d never come off the road. One, called Goldie, was a regular and turned up one day with what looked like a gangrenous arm. “How did you get this?” I asked. “Rats” was his one word reply. I quizzed him a bit and he seemed to be very scared of any sort of institution – including hospitals. This was a common factor with many of our visitors, so I did a deal and said “if I can get you into A&E without sitting in a waiting room will you let me take you?” He agreed this would be alright and so I phoned the Consultant, (a friend), and we arranged for Goldie to jump the queue. He was absolutely alive with lice but I bit the bullet and drove over (leaning slightly towards the open window) and the hospital kept their side of the bargain and took him straight through.
As they helped him off with layer after layer of clothes I swear I’ve never seen so much livestock on a human being. I’m beginning to itch as I write this! Then they cleaned him off with Swarfega which they apparently kept especially for these situations and cleaned up the festering bites (yes, plural) and injected him with antibiotics. Meanwhile I chatted to him about how long he’d been on the road and he told me he’d become known as Goldie because he’d gone on the road during the time in 1965 when a Golden Eagle called Goldie (Gallic shrug) had escaped from Regents Park zoo. The eagle was eventually recaptured after killing one of the American Ambassador’s ducks and attacking a couple of terriers but my Goldie had never spent a night indoors since then. That put him at least 15 years on the road. He was a nice guy, small and quiet and very self-contained. The doctors asked where he was going – he walked everywhere – and he said he was going to Gloucester; so they typed up a letter for the Royal Infirmary there and begged him to go there as soon as he arrived. He insisted that I set him down on the A38 at the exact spot I’d found him and wouldn’t hear of me driving him to Gloucester. Later I discovered he’d never shown up at Gloucester and I never heard of him or saw him again. I bought a couple of cans of insect killer from the local farm supplier on the way home.
Another regular turned up looking dreadful and blagged a few paracetamols off Madame; so she gave him the tablets and a drink with a bag of sandwiches and he set off towards Thornbury. Minutes later she got a call from the nextdoor (previous) parish warning her not to give him any paracetamol because she’d already given him some. Madame phoned ahead to Thornbury and warned them what had happened – just in case. We thought we might have killed him but he seemed to survive the onslaught of goodwill because he came back a year later.
But what I’m about to write about takes the Palme d’Or. A once in a lifetime stocking filler for a knackered Vicar looking for a Christmas sermon. Sadly, though, I’ve never used it because – once again – I don’t know how it ended but I fear it didn’t go well.
Imagine – nineteen rowdy Christmas carol services in, with three still to go and we’re chilling in front of a log fire, watching telly with a glass of wine in our hands when the doorbell rings. …..
“Hello?”
“My waters have broken”
In front of me was a young woman, pretty bedraggled and more than a bit grubby but manifestly very very pregnant. Lurking darkly in the background was a young man. It was a bitterly cold, frosty December night and so I did what all sensible middle aged men do – I shouted
“MADAME”
We had a huddled conversation in the hall along the lines of – “theresthisgirloutsideandherboyfriendandshesaysherwatershavebrokenandshelookspegnantandIdontknowwhatwecandobutwillyoucomeandjustlook!” …..”please?”
Madame immediately took charge and whisked the girl up to the bathroom, got her undressed and into a warm bath. The odd partner refused point blank to come in so I left him outside and shut the door on him. I didn’t fancy having him wandering around stealing the family silver (ho ho) while we delivered a baby! But I decided – discretion being the better part of valour – that I’d stay out of the way and hit the phone trying to find a midwife. You have no idea how difficult it can be to get a midwife to turn out at night. I rang the district; all the maternity services I could think of; and the GP surgeries and no-one was prepared to come out. Meanwhile, Madame arrived back downstairs with the young woman looking a great deal cleaner and wearing a completely different and very familiar set of clothes. The old ones we just binned.
The full story began to come out and she told us the reason they were sleeping rough was that her last baby (!) had been taken away by Social Services and the only way she could keep this baby was to have it – as she said – “In a hedge”. She’d met the young man when they were both inpatients at a mental health unit. They refused point blank to take up the offer of a bed for the night, and eventually – way after midnight – a midwife drove out from Bristol, examined her and said that her waters hadn’t broken yet. So that was that. I thought that the boyfriend was controlling and possibly abusive but we needed to keep them close enough overnight to get more help in the morning.
It was, as I said, bitterly cold but at his insistence they would sleep in a bus shelter. So we gave them blankets and sandwiches which he threw down angrily in front of us because they didn’t eat meat! He had terrible acne and didn’t look as if he cared much about either of them. So first thing in the morning I found them in the bus shelter and begged them to just wait while I tried to get more help, and after a couple of hours on the phone I found some emergency accommodation in Bath. Once again I offered to drive them but he refused so I gave them their bus fare, wrote the address on a piece of paper and they set off. They never showed up in Bath and I never found out how the story continued.
And I’ve never used the story because – I very much hope – those vulnerable lives are still being lived out there somewhere; and I also hope that they finally found someone with the resources to help them – not just me with nothing to offer but goodwill and the wrong sandwiches. No kings showed up, there were no guiding stars, no shepherds and Jesus failed to be born in a bus shelter.
