Category: About the Potwell Inn

The good life myths that hide the reality

We want change but we want nothing altered – William Cobbett

Three Cornish pasties

I was shocked today to discover that I have a bit of an obsession with food. My shock was brought about by the sheer number of food photographs I’ve taken while I was looking for pictures to illustrate this post on the subject of what’s come to be known as Regional Food after reading a piece in the Guardian about a recently published book by the Italian academic Alberto Grandi called La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist). He argues that in reality there was no substantial Italian cuisine (the choice of the French term ‘cuisine’ rather gives the game away). What we know as the rather mythic pasta + nonna idea came into existence when so many utterly impoverished migrants left italy and arrived in America where they experienced an abundance of food for the first time. I’ve seen that happen myself. Back in the eighties I was on a course with students from all over the world and one of them was from Eastern Europe. He kept going missing but we could always find him gazing into the window of a local butcher – he’d never seen anything like it. He was so overwhelmed with the abundance of our food that we would take extra each meal and pass it to him. Grandi describes that cultural collision as you might describe an F1 hybrid. Two less productive strains interbreeding can bring about fantastically productive offspring. He’s not saying that there is no Italian food tradition, but that – real as it may be today – it’s not very old. It got me thinking about other so-called traditions that you would never have found in their alleged countries of origin – Balti and Korma owe more to Birmingham than to India; most French haute cuisine can be attributed to the unemployed chefs of the post revolutionary vanquished rich. Fusion cooking to the collision of Australia with Japan; Chinese cooking which came to be known and popularised by waves of immigrant chefs in chip shops but which barely scratched the surface of the diverse cultures of such a huge nation. And then there’s the great unwashed – the tradition of english cooking.

My mind travelled back almost immediately to William Cobbett, radical, grumpy and outrageously opinionated pamphleteer as well as hilariously funny writer. In Cottage Economy he tried to set out the proper diet for an Englishman and got very indignant about potatoes which he thought made farm labourers weak and lazy, and the drinking of tea which he said made women into gossips and made men become effeminate. For Cobbett, the only proper diet was based on bread, bacon and beer; grown, fattened and brewed by the happy labourer. The two books, “Cottage Economy” and “Rural Rides“; written in the shadow of poverty and starvation after years of war are still worth reading if only for a glimpse of his burning indignation. Bacon and eggs, Sunday Roast, good bread and plenty of meat became the iconic staples of the English diet, especially in the wake of wartime rationing. Meat and two veg was at least factually accurate even when it became a snide insult. It was the diet I grew up on.

Heaven forfend – chillies, borlotti, passata – what’s the world coming to?

Madame had more contact with an alternative tradition because one of her aunts had married into money, and she spent holidays as a companion for a cousin. It was whilst staying there (just the once) that I read Mrs Beeton and wondered at the extravagance of some of the recipes – “take a dozen eggs and three pints of best cream” – that kind of thing. I didn’t laugh at it – I wanted some of it for us too. After we got married and realized that neither of us could cook, a friend gave us some Elizabeth David and so now my list of inspirational writers extends to dozens, and they fill bookcases in the flat.

As for English cuisine; looking through the photos I’d say there is still a very diverse history of English cooking. After Mrs Beeton; Eliza Acton, Jane Grigson, Dorothy Hartley are among many more food writers who kept the tradition alive and many others have carried on to the present day. Even if there never was a properly understood traditional cuisine, there was always an uncollated mass of good recipes made excellent with fresh vegetables, meat and fish. As ever, cooking and eating what’s to hand and affordable – fish or lamb, pork or beef depends on a wealth of non-culinary variables and the lazy journalistic trick of listing the best of everything from trifles to testicles is just silly. Even a bucket of offal, like the one below, when respectfully and creatively prepared and cooked, can be a feast. (It can also be terrible – trust me).

Patés, cakes, puddings, toad in the hole, cheeses, faggots and bread with all manner of vegetables are still on the Potwell Inn menu. In the last three days we had Sunday roast; liver and onions and then – classical leftover food- cold chicken with bubble and squeak and home made chutney. Shopping and cooking, then sharing a meal with friends and family is one of the great creative joys of being alive. Slow food needs to be accompanied by slow eating.

But food – like every other aspect of culture in the UK – is deeply influenced by social class. Back in the 80’s we were living (as ever) in a block of flats and upstairs there was another tenant who came from a profoundly different and bourgeois background. We got on pretty well in general but one day she came down to see us about something just as we were making some food for my parents. Later her husband came down in fits of laughter and told us that she’d rushed upstairs and said “R – You have to go down and see Dave and his wife, they’re making a real working class tea! It was the tinned salmon sandwiches that did for us, I think. Major class signifier!

The problem today is not so much which recipes people cook, but that so many people don’t cook at all. The traditional meat and two veg diet was pretty boring, but properly cooked it’s still a nutritious meal, unlike the ultra processed foods that are slowly poisoning a whole generation and inexorably lowering the quality and life-expectancy of the life of the poor but also the well paid but chronically overworked people in the middle . The challenge is that when you’re struggling to pay the rent there just isn’t time to bone a breast of lamb, let alone grow an allotment and when you’re working 12 hours a day and six days a week like many professionals have to do; then time, not money is the limiting factor.

But eating out can be a far more dispiriting experience even than a takeaway – what with the virtual extinction of properly trained chefs. Two of our sons are chefs and they tell us that many young people looking for jobs have never eaten good food, and are unaware that kitchens are dangerous places in which hot fat, slippery floors and sharp knives can cause serious injury.

So I’m not saying that regional cuisines don’t exist, but that in the hands of skilled and well read cooks and chefs, a miracle can happen in which local English foods, like lamb, bacon, thyme, potatoes and carrots with the addition of a glass of wine and some garlic , can be inflected with the flavours of Provence and become carbonnade nimoise. Regional food is a dance performed by a skilled and knowledgeable cook, a selection of local fresh produce and a well equipped kitchen informed with wisdom and love.

Sherry trifle – one sponge, one bottle of sherry? The glacė angelica took a bit of finding!

Turning a photo into a story and then into a post

There are two questions here that I’m trying to answer. The first is the title of this post, and the second is an attempt at explaining why I call myself Severnsider – and I’ll tackle that one first.

I think these photos were taken some time around 2007, although I’d known the place for years prior to that. If you live nearby, or know the river Severn on the Gloucestershire side you’ll probably know where they were taken on the Gloucestershire riverside and along the Sharpness canal at Frampton on Severn. The Severn is, as you can see, a very wide river but dangerous for larger ships to navigate above Sharpness due to the ferocious tides, winds and sandbanks. There was also a problem in sailing around a sharp bend in Arlingham which is a good place to watch the Severn bore but a very bad place for a sailing ship. The canal, opened in 1827, could carry ships up to 600 tons and was once the largest and deepest (18 feet) canal in the world . It was a safe, non-tidal shortcut to Gloucester docks. Over the decades we’ve fished in the canal, walked its towpath and paddled up it in our kayak. There are many places I love and visit but in a strange way, the river Severn has my soul. One of my parishes bordered the bank and it’s always been a place of solace on difficult days – lonely, quite remote in places with huge skies and a tide so fierce you can hear it above the mournful cries of wintering curlew.

As the tide from the Bristol channel meets the river there’s the meeting of two distinct modes of being – each with its own smell; earthy, mountainous river and salt tide. Twice a day, the inbreathing and outbreathing flows change places and command the landscape. Springs and neaps cover and reveal the mudflats

The Severn has wonderful sunsets, and on special evenings you can hear migrating geese and swans flying noisily towards the tidal marshes at Slimbridge. It’s a sound so haunting that it will freeze your blood. On one occasion I was walking on the bank at Shepperdine when a hare raced up the field to my right, leaped over a broken wooden fence and crossed, feet in front of me in mid-air. I don’t know which of us was more surprised. It was there, at high tide in the middle of the river and just inside our parish, that I scattered the ashes of a Severn pilot, a man with a lifetime of experience of the twists and turns and shifting sandbanks of the river who would take charge of ships travelling upstream . One of the crew opened a steel door in the side of the Balmoral and to the accompaniment of long blasts on the steam whistle, we poured his ashes into the water just as the tide turned and the river stood still. The trippers on the deck above us had no idea what was happening below them. The two waterways, canal and river, run side by side; the contained and dredged canal -an industrial relic of a past age and its wild and untamable neighbour. A watery Cain and Abel in perpetual conflict like the two sides of a human soul.

Inevitably, as a parish priest, I became a kind of story keeper; privy to many secrets and at ease with the history of the landscape and the people who lived in it because – in a very important sense – they were one. I may well have seen the last ever trailer load of salmon putchers being taken down to the river. The village baker’s wife and her husband had roots in both sides of the river, and would often talk about elver fishing and elver omelette where the freshly caught baby eels were tipped alive into the egg mixture in the pan. He remembered delivering bread by horse and cart. The orchards along the river were protected from frosts by the thermal mass of the water and thousands of gallons of cider were once made on local farms to slake the thirst of the labourers. I got to know one or two of the surviving cider makers pretty well. I once asked one of them why he liked cider so much and he answered “because it gets I pissed!”. The local funeral director was another hefted man who began life as a builder and joiner and made coffins according to the custom of the day; graduating to funeral directing as a natural progression. The gravedigger would always discreetly press a jelly baby or some other sweet into my hand as we processed to the graveside. It was a surviving custom from when everyone was rewarded in cash after a funeral. We referred to one another as gentlemen and bowed as if we were born to it.

I was the story keeper because I took many of the village funerals, weddings and baptisms. I have never felt able to write about those years in any detail because so much of what I knew was told to me in confidence, but I learned the skill of discreet storytelling over three decades, slipping in a coded morsel known only to the closest friends when I could. Most of the old ways and those who followed them are gone now and the suburban villages empty of commuters and refill again in the evenings. The salmon have all-but disappeared and the churches are shrinking and falling into disuse.

Oh yes; the Severn is a very special place and having lived next to it for 25 years it’s the reason I use the name Severnsider. Although these days we live in Bath, the campervan is stored near the banks of the Severn, and the river Avon on whose bank we now live, is a tributary to the mother river which it joins at Avonmouth.

Anyway enough history, because I want to move on to the more interesting question of storytelling with pictures, and the impact of computer technology enabling us to do things we could not have contemplated thirty years ago when I stood on the riverbank, looking at the long row of apparently abandoned barges, hauled up and left to rot. I know, of course that there was a story shouting to come out of the landscape. The melancholic look of rusting hulks and concrete tow barges sinking inexorably into the estuary mud suggested a catastrophic collapse in the market of some commodity. That was a wrong assumption as it turned out because they were deliberately scuttled there in an attempt to protect the river bank from erosion. The pictures haunted me.

I knew I had the raw materials of a new way of understanding landscape but there seemed to be no way of making it work. I wanted to find a way of telling stories with pictures and text but which you could enter at any point, and so read in any order – which is much closer to the way we actually apprehend landscape in real life. Then I discovered HTML but not being very computer literate, the learning curve defeated me. It was the arrival of journaling software and later blogging software that finally opened the door for me. I could utilise the thousands of photographs I’d taken over the years and write accompanying text that could illuminate any topic I was writing about. The photos weren’t eye catching snapshots but little visual haiku, working with the text to say what couldn’t easily be said in words. They became little essays, often exploring a single idea with no attempt for them to be amalgamated into a theory of everything. By now there are over a thousand of them, rapidly approaching a million words in a form that can be searched by date, by topic, by keyword or even just with a single search term.

All this because a single photograph can conjure up a whole habitat or environment; a whole history of the people who live and work in it and occasionally amount to a funeral sermon for something or someone lost forever. This photograph, for instance, taken on Thursday at Big Pit above Blaenavon suggests to me something that’s not telling the whole story; that needs unpacking. The bright red paint and hand lettering suggest that this truck does not, any longer, contain explosives at all. It’s there for effect, as part of an experience – which is what it is, of course. Possibly a film set.

But this one, taken moments later, is telling a more subtle story; of abandonment and dereliction. Present and past are expressed in the course of a few words on a screen. Now we know that something infinitely less fun is going on. There are two steam engines there, each of them deserving restoration but lacking the funds to do it. In a supreme irony, the high quality steam coal which was mined here and which is needed by every steam restoration project in the UK can no longer be mined because of the environmental damage caused by burning coal. We were told that the last two shipments of steam coal came by boat from Chile and Australia. So coal will still be burned but also thousands of tons of oil burned added to the total environmental cost. A third photograph has an entirely more melancholy feel because behind the abandoned winch gear, and in the distance, lies a town that feels as abandoned as the headworks of the pit. With the end of coal mining, thousands of jobs were lost and never replaced with skilled work. Coal was King and now unemployment drains the eviscerated community below. The museum is a marvellous and pointed reminder of yet another lost community.

Oh how miserable this is sounding! Let’s turn to nature. Many of the thousands of photographs I’ve taken are of plants, fungi and even insects. They’re the other part of landscape – the micro features that make it what it is. You’ll know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, that I’m pretty passionate about the waifs and strays of the plant world which find a place to settle in precisely the abandoned post industrial sites, marginal environments and polluted earth that – like the human communities that once lived and worked in them – have fallen silent as the dreams of the industrial revolution; of easy lives and plentiful housing and food for all come to dust. Things are unravelling and we all know it, in spite of the performative idiocy of politicians who think that having your photo taken with a hi-viz jacket, hard hat and sleeves rolled up is a substitute for having any idea or plan for the future.

Is it even possible to love a despoiled landscape and yet hate what caused it? I think I’m able to address that paradox in a way that might offer a way forward. Firstly the earth doesn’t need us nearly as much as we need the earth, and so in recording what’s there needn’t be a source of anger is much as an encouragement and inspiration to do better. To do better for human communities, to do better for the plants and insects and animals share the earth with us. On our walk in the Bannau Brycheiniog on Thursday we were looking at some slime moulds – a subject which I know almost nothing about. But I did a quick search in Merlin Sheldrake’s book “Entangled Life” and discovered that the humble slime mould can help to make a map to escape from an Ikea store with no more encouragement than a few bright lights and some oatmeal. We dismiss the strange intelligence of nature at our peril. We shall need to review, and experiment and rethink the way we do things around here – I mean our whole culture – in a way that no-one in living memory has had to do because the crisis is here. Even our short journey across the Severn was delayed by 24 hours by an unprecedented storm. Our memories of the past need not fall into the trap of sentimentality and nostalgia. We can be grown-up enough to see that the communities built up by mining had costs as well as benefits and we need not return to the whole package of riches extracted and suffering exacted. What nature demonstrates is the persistence that comes from environmental stability, and so to finish here’s a photograph taken on our friends’ smallholding of a small patch of ancient woodland which has been protected by the steepness of the field in which it stands.

Small is beautiful – smaller still is ravishing.

This photograph is not of a twig but a moth; the Buff-tip moth, Phalera bucephala. I’m not showing it because I’d want anyone to think me an expert of any kind, but because its camouflage is so perfect at the same time as being very lovely. It’s eye-watering to think how many evolutionary twists and turns it’s gone through to arrive at this perfect twigness in order that it can rest up safely during the day. Our friend Kate uses a moth trap to identify record and release any number of moth species high up in the Bannau Brycheiniog; the Brecon Beacons in old money, and we took this photo, along with many others, early one morning when we were staying up there.

I’m often struck by the lack of attention we pay to the very small when we talk about the beauty of nature. We tend to look for swathes of flowers; forests; endless mountains and the most grandiose hills when we speak of beauty, but if we take a magnifying glass to, let’s say a weed like a dandelion, it’s like crossing a boundary into another world. A single seed under a low powered microscope can reveal such a complexity of pattern and structure that we’d be hard pressed to capture it in a drawing. Nature presents herself as an artist and many artists would admit to gaining inspiration from the almost reckless generosity of living forms. Moths are just one example. From the aerial view of a river basin or wetland marsh down to the double helix of DNA and the complex fibonacci sequence of seeds on a sunflower head or the seed flask of a poppy, there’s inspiration to be found. Speaking through my artist’s hat, as you might say, I’ve shared a lifetime exploring the colours and forms of living things through the medium of drawing, botanical illustration and ceramics. I’ve needed to embrace some of the science as well, but the wellspring of my explorations has been aesthetic rather than scientific. I’m far more excited by the earthy colours of rust and ochre than by shouty primaries, and a multitude of green hues relieved by occasional touches of scarlet can turn a humble lichen into an aesthetic feast.

Nature is beautiful, but not in the guide book sense. You can’t measure beauty by counting oohs and aaahs and you couldn’t propose a unit like the Milli-Helen which would be the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. It’s expressed perfectly in my mother’s distinction between perfume and scent. I should mention here that I’ve been trying out a new phone app to help identify moths – in anticipation of a Christmas present from our son. In fact it’s good with all kinds of UK insects and designed and promoted by the UK Wildlife Trusts. The app is called ID UK Insects and it’s good for bees, hoverflies, spiders, wasps – in fact for pretty well any insect you might encounter on a slow walk and is free for a basic 500 species or £18 a year for the full version. Well worth a free go! It won’t excuse you from any of the hard book work when you get home to identify your find, but like all the best AI it will save the horror of flicking through hundreds of pages in the vain hope you might run across it! For those old hands who would assert that it’s cheating I’d say – “so’s a cake mixer!”

It would be wrong to settle on the moth as a sole exemplar. As I suggested at the beginning of this post, nature should be regarded as everything on earth including us, and my friend Chris would make a strong claim for the whole universe to be included as well. In fact – and this would be a bold and almost spiritual claim – I’d argue that the default condition of a fully functioning human mind would be wonder.

I’ve never forgotten an exercise I did on a retreat years ago. We were a group of a dozen or so, all strangers to one another. We were divided into couples and asked to grasp both hands of our partners. Then we were invited not just to look at one another or chat about our journey there but silently to explore the possibilities of beholding. As you might expect, it was a deeply challenging thing to do but it was also very powerful; an intuitive exchange of our deep selves and a letting go of embarrassment and ego. I’d suggest that the default position of wonder at natural beauty is facilitated by its twin faculty, beholding.

With such a mindset even the destructive powers of nature which, for the most part are recycling the elements of existence, can lead to the sense of wonder. Nothing is ever wasted by the woodland rotters like the Sulphur-tuft fungus above. I can contemplate my own vulnerability and transience without being afraid.

Around 1970/71 I had a long period of what was diagnosed as phobic anxiety, and not being able to face going into art school, they put me on probation for a couple of terms. I took to visiting the valley behind our cottage through which By Brook flowed, and drawing there. My memory ever since is that I only made one drawing – very laborious and forensic pencil rendering of a twisted tree trunk growing at the edge of the river. The drawing went into a folder and it’s travelled around from house to house ever since. I’ve looked for it from time to time but never found it among the hoardings; until last night I dreamed that I was able to thank all the people who loved me over the years – beginning of course with Madame – even when I didn’t love myself at all. I was awake at 5.00am and got up after a couple of hours musing on what Robin, my one time psychoanalytic psychotherapist would have called a significant dream and went into my study and found the drawing almost immediately in a heap of unsorted papers.

But it wasn’t just the one drawing; I found four of them – and each of them would have taken several days. Here they are seeing the light of day for over five decades.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that these are great drawings, but rather that they articulate a theme that had been at the back of my mind for going on twenty years after I walked to primary school through a lane bordered on one side by a hawthorn hedge which, in hindsight must have been laid in previous years. I was enchanted, almost literally, by the twisted and intertwined branches and it became a treasured part of my walk to school, a memory which returns joyfully whenever I see a similar hedge today. After I’d photographed the drawings this morning I realised that there was another subconscious link in the twisting and curling water of the brook and which I’d tried unsuccessfully to capture in drawings of the sea when we lived in Cornwall. Drawing – to pack a huge proposition into a very short sentence – has been a way back into a transient moment. A mill-race; the Devonshire leat on Dartmoor; any kind of fast flowing water especially if, like a canal, it was the outcome of human intervention. No surprise then, to recall that my favourite winter job as a groundsperson was hedge laying. The spot where I drew By Brook was downstream from a paper mill where the mill race joined the brook. The mill is now disused and abandoned, and the brook itself is milky and eutrophic; quite unsuitable for papermaking.

If there is any kind of takeaway from this biographical fragment it’s that I didn’t get this ecstatic, aesthetic response to nature from a guru or a book. It was always there and all I had to do was channel it into tangible form. So the next great adventure was in ceramics. I’ve already written about this and I won’t go over it again, except to say that the making of ceramics feels like participation in creation itself. All the essential elements; earth, air, fire and water are there. The transformation of clay into fired ware is a geological process, The colours are made with elemental minerals and ores – cobalt, iron, lead, melted and rendered transparent in the kiln and transformed by the control of the available oxygen. English iron-based slipware glazes, mixed with lead rich galena and fired in an abundance of oxygen emerged the colour of honey and in China, a similar iron based glazed fluxed with wood ash and and starved of oxygen in the final stage of firing emerged as celedon, a muted and lovely green the colour of lichen.. The making of ceramics is an exhausting creative process which is affected by so many variables that if the potter doesn’t learn both intense focus and how to survive failure they will soon give up.

Nowadays I use photography to try to capture nature. I don’t edit or enhance anything and if it doesn’t work I delete it and try again. I remember once having a battle with my art school Head of Department over the characteristic form of an apple tree. I contended that trees are hard to draw well because by forensically rendering their internal structure and the form of the whole tree, its colours and its leaves it would be easier to identify its species. To prove my point I’d knocked up a black and white sketch of an apple tree on a piece of cardboard with a wide brush and some house paint. He dismissed the drawing and the idea with a lofty wave of the hand. It was rubbish and all trees looked pretty much the same. This week I’ve mentioned an apple tree called Arkansas Black several times already and today I returned to that discussion by photographing the tree on the allotment. I hope I won’t offend anyone by saying that the form of the tree is completely distinctive. Pears plums and (at the time) English elms are incontestably different.

My old music teacher A F Woodman used to to shout at me if I was particularly inattentive and say “I know you can hear it Pole, but are you listening?”

Wonder; the capacity to behold and not just gawp; inexhaustible curiosity; focus; listening; some measure of humility; the capacity to fail, try again as Samuel Beckett said, and fail better – all these are the portals through which we must pass. To adopt a religious idea, we must approach nature as penitents – not least because we, collectively, have done so much damage. The technical understanding, the skills, the science need essentially to be led by the revelatory moment. Most truly great scientists and mathematicians would agree that the revelatory moment is the beginning of the process of understanding rather than the end.

Which brings me to a penultimate point. If there is ever to be a real green spirituality it will need to begin in the same place. I remember Ken Leach preaching that orthodoxy is closer to its Greek roots when translated as “right glory” and certainly not the slavish following of some ancient canonical text. I’m not sure what we could call theology without Theos, but I treasure Wittgenstein’s joke that “wherof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent” except that it’s never yet stopped a daft or cruel idea from being broadcast.

So to conclude this rather long post, I have to write briefly about education because it seems that these core skills – “Wonder; the capacity to behold and not just gawp; inexhaustible curiosity; focus; listening; some measure of humility; the capacity to fail, try again as Samuel Beckett said, and fail better” all these are being expunged from the curriculum of both school and university. If we don’t bring our children up to allow wonder and curiosity into their lives they will be stunted like wind deformed trees .

Hell is heaven designed by venture capitalists

Don’t it always seem to go – that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?

Black headed gull – St Ives 1st March 2016

I remember taking this photograph for two reasons; firstly because I was annoyed with myself for not knowing what what this seagull was called but more importantly, as it turned out, because it led me to make a stupidly hubristic promise to myself that I wouldn’t, any more, walk past anything I couldn’t name. With 20/20 retrospective vision I wish I’d left “walk on by” as a heading on my mental spreadsheet but in fact I immediately left the quayside at St Ives to find a bookshop to help end my personal dark age. So I ended up with the worst of all worlds – not knowing the proper names of most plants, birds, fungi, lichens, insects and mammals but feeling very troubled when I failed.

The reason I’m writing this today is that after a talk at the Bath Natural History Society on Tuesday I was chatting to the speaker, Lucy Starling and she wondered aloud where all the black-headed gulls had gone. Back in 2016 by the time I’d figured out what they were; (complicated by the fact that they don’t have black heads at all during the winter but just a grey streak like a question mark behind the ear); I realized that there were dozens if not hundreds of them in Bath, flocking together on the green outside our flat in the mornings. They are lovely little birds – small seagulls – but they have declined so much that they’ve now been listed with an amber warning.

So why has this happened? Well, rather carelessly I attributed this to the theft by commercial foragers of thousands of their eggs from nesting sites on the South coast a few years ago for sale to high end restaurants; which is astonishing but true! But in any case the trend has been towards them living inland, and there are other factors – avian flu, lack of nesting space (the good people of Bath are highly intolerant of gulls, although their bird identification skills are no better than mine were). We have three species in Bath. The principal culprits when it comes to early morning noise, rubbish bag spreading and stealing ice creams would be herring gulls or less likely lesser black backed gulls. Herring gulls too are in decline. We don’t have greater black backed gulls here but they’re the ones with the terrifying eyes that could turn you to stone. They’ve all been affected by climate change; absence of food due to changing farming practices and loss of habitat. So below are – on the left a herring gull (pale grey wings and pink legs) and on the right a lesser black-backed gull (darker grey, almost black with yellow legs).

From my entirely non-scientific survey through the living room window, I’d say that aside from the odd stragglers up and down the river, the large gatherings of black headed gulls have gone, possibly for ever.

Two black-headed gulls chatting on a fence.

I didn’t mention one other contributor to the decline and that’s predation. The photo above was taken across the river from St John’s Church – which houses a pair of peregrine falcons for whom a small gull would barely amount to elevenses.

So just to make a more complete list of urban birds we’d have to add the three gulls; kingfishers near the Royal Mail sorting office; the well known Widcombe herons whose heronry is above the Honda dealership; plus the jackdaws, crows, magpies, and jays representing the corvids and there are cormorants fishing in the river. Then there are blackbirds and pigeons, robins but not, sadly, sparrows or starlings close to us. There are swifts in the summer, with swallows and house-martins and then rarer appearances from the avian odds and sods categories. The red kites don’t seem to cross the river but buzzards are often seen over the allotment. The first night after we moved in, we heard tawny owls calling, but never since – however our neighbour Charlie says he still hears them regularly. All in all – and this is just an off the top of my head list – simply knowing their names has given me enormous pleasure over the years. It creates a feeling of belonging when you know the locals by name.

I’ve written a lot about urban plants on this blog, and when I get the fungi organized I’ll be able to name many more of them. My point in banging on about urban wildlife is that it’s right outside the door and so walking to Sainsbury’s can be as much of a field-trip as a long drive to Cornwall (which we also do regularly of course). Possibly the best place to find wildlife is where you are. Of course I’m not saying that travelling to hotspots isn’t worth it because you’ll never learn more quickly than when you walk with an expert who’s also a good teacher. But an hour’s mild bewilderment followed by a couple of hours of research will drive the message home more. Both is best.

A quick trip to America

A further update to the is it/isn’t it? problem with a tree full of black apples on the allotment site. After a lot of searching online we think we’ve finally nailed it down to the Arkansas Black mainly due to its extraordinary, complex flavour. The perfume of the flesh eaten raw is – as I previously said – like apple and custard in one bite. Today Madame peeled and stewed a small number and they were equally delicious. Just like a Cox, they kept their texture very well and didn’t reduce to a pulp as would a bramley – so they’d be great for a French style open apple tart. The only problem is we can’t find a UK nursery who could provide it on a dwarfing or semi dwarfing rootstock. Madame is going to try growing it from a cutting but apparently it’s hard to do and it would take years to fruit. She could polish up on her grafting skills too! It’s a perfect tree for our frost prone allotment because it will grow in almost any zone, is self fertile and very disease resistant. Plus it stores well and harvests in November. What’s not to like? I could buy it from a nursery in Montana but I don’t think the car would get there.

Stewed Arkansas Black

The allotment in its winter clothes

We’ve been working hard to get the allotment ready for winter and – of course the spring which we hope will follow in due course. All of the water butts are full to overflowing , the pruning of the apples is finished and at the moment we’re mainly preoccupied with renewing paths, weeding and mulching although not all the fruit trees are pruned at this time. We’ve also been gathering strawberry runners to grow on in the greenhouse.

While I was writing yesterday about the urban wildlife that surrounds us I completely forgot to mention that just as we were walking up the road a couple of weeks ago we saw a sparrowhawk – probably a female – dive on a pigeon, which seemed to escape her talons right in front of us. Later we heard her distinctive call.. However, the next morning as we left the house a rather sad and bedraggled pigeon crept out from behind the mini flower garden by the door. It was a completely unexpected joy for us to see a sparrowhawk outside the door, although probably not for the pigeon. We left the bird to its own devices and went on our way.

No finer view of Bath on a frosty December morning?

South Riverside development – not what the PR goons want you to see.

Bath, of course, thrives by stoking a whole cruise liner full of hype. This year it’s Jane Austen but the Georgian builders also get roped in to set the scene (please don’t mention the slave trade) and otherwise we have to make do with the Romans who turned a boggy hot spring into a R&R destination for grubby and probably smelly legionnaires who needed a soak after marching around subduing the natives. We do not talk about the brothels on London Road, the extra marital uses of the Sidney Gardens or, indeed the drinking dens and brothels of Kingsmead. We don’t talk about Bath’s industrial past; the pong of the dyeworks, the pioneering engineering, the digging of the Kennet and Avon canal which – when joined to the Somerset coal canal – provided an easy route for transporting coal from the North Somerset to what William Cobbett called the great wen (London). We don’t talk about the pollution of the river which was probably as bad then as it is today, or the Great Western railway which most of us can’t afford to travel on. We don’t talk about the Somerset and Dorset line (known as the S&D i.e. slow and dirty) or the twin tunnels which were so small in girth that engine drivers and firemen expected to pass out regularly in the carbon monoxide and smoke, praying that they didn’t do it at the same time.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. If you drive into any major European city; in France for example, it’s almost obligatory to pass a few cement works. Drive north from Barcelona and you’ll see an industrial landscape comparable with the finest of Middlesbrough or Wolverhampton – and they don’t brag about it either. But personally I’m glad that I can still walk along the riverside and the canal and find hundreds of interesting plants without the danger (apart from some cyclists) of meeting anyone wearing a voluminous dress and bonnet or a soldier sporting a skirt, hobnailed sandals and shaved legs. Bath is divided by the river into two utterly different psychogeographical regions. North of the river is the posh, Georgian architectural bit where the visitors come, and to the south where the industry used to be, we have student accommodation and the uncontrolled growth of hideously expensive retirement properties which are a very profitable way of extracting value from pension savings – and for anyone contemplating buying one I’d advise that finding a GP, an NHS dentist or an appointment with the NHS Hospital may be the quickest way to lose the rest of your savings. Private care is booming here.

But a quiet, early morning stroll along the riverside path reminds me that nature always manages to make an appearance regardless of the noise and dust of building sites and traffic. I’m a creature of habit and so my walks tend to concentrate on a few areas. If I was trying to impress I suppose I could call the walks transects – which is a natural history word for repeating a walk along a particular route and recording everything I see. When this is done over a period of years, it yields invaluable scientific information about climate change and its effect on wildlife. I can begin to see which unusual plants are the chancers with no chance of setting up home. I could see (but haven’t yet) both otters and beavers in the river and we have filmed mice, rats, deer, badgers, foxes squirrels and cats on our allotment; and I can also see newcomers settling down having found a new niche for themselves. Slow walking could be a thing just as slow cooking has, because everything becomes richer and more engaging as I learn more about the area. The wildlife of an area has a certain “thusness” and directness about it that the muddy pond of mediated experience – (can you see the word media barely hiding in there?) – just can’t match. Mediated Bath is like the worst of takeaway food – it always leaves you malnourished and hungry – but wild Bath is always at hand; in the pavement cracks, in basement walls, in unkempt verges and building sites and instead of scuttling along my walks like a rat, I can walk slowly and savour every moment as a kind of epiphany. So build on – you rubbish architects, greedy developers and landlords. You and your buildings as ephemeral as a hatching mosquito and less deserving of our deference.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been reading a lot about fungi, and it seems to me that if we’re taking the latest science at all seriously, we have to accept that a serious amount of mutuality goes on in nature. Plants and fungi almost universally exchange nutrients to their mutual benefit. Lichens have evolved an even closer togetherness by uniting bacteria and/or algae into an apparently singular life form. Plants rely on insects and larger animals for pollination and seed distribution; swapping pollen for nectar and taking seeds away in paws and fur and droppings. Even apex predators normally tend only to kill and eat when they’re hungry. In fact Nature seems to prefer a situation where every life form gets something out of the arrangement: all of nature except we humans who think we’ve got the right to take it all without regard to the needs of any other creature.

I have a correction – or perhaps an addition to my piece yesterday which mentioned a black apple which I was told was French in origin and called L’Abri. The apple tree on the allotment site matched the description of an American apple called Arkansas Black very closely especially in its perfumed flavour of apple and custard; but today in a bit of further exploration on the National Fruit Collection website – which is brilliant – I came up with a Belgian apple called Abi Noir which looks almost identical to the American is much cheaper – £14 as opposed to a greedy £350 for the bare root tree.

This morning we worked in frost and sunshine on the allotment and it was lovely to be outside in the winter weather. Our son phoned to ask about presents at Christmas and said he’d be happy to buy us a portable moth trap if we’d like it. Well yes we would, rather!! trying not to sound too excited. There’s more wildlife around in city centres than you’d ever imagine. Below are a few photos of bits of the wild that caught my eye as I walked back from the garage, all within sight and sound of the building site across the river. They are, clockwise, an abandoned bird’s nest, the riverside path, the last bloom on a dog rose and the river bathed in mist. If you look carefully at the nest it includes bits of wool, bindweed, insulation mat, grass and twigs. You see, nature is even better than we are at recycling. The nest, by the way, was right next door to the recycling depot.

Over the hill – I think this is where my Dad drank too much cider and fell off his motor bike!

I’ve never had the opportunity to take a photo of this view before, although we’ve driven along the route and caught buses many times. For reasons too dull to repeat, the nurse that used to keep my ears free of wax – moved from the end of the road where we live and went to Fairfield Park where I took the pictures today. Being a creature of habit I started going to her new clinic which is 250 feet higher up on the side of Lansdown and three miles up a steep hill.

I left an abundance of time to catch the bus this morning but the bus company must have seen it was a fine sunny day and so (without any warning) they cancelled two buses in succession and gave me the ‘opportunity’ to keep my appointment by walking there as fast as I could. At the top of Walcot street, before I’d begun to warm up I began to wonder. Imagine the humiliation of lying on the pavement waiting to be carted off in an ambulance. But as always, when in doubt, I slow down a bit and I can’t begin to say how pleased I was when I arrived with 1 minute to spare and without having to stop and clutch a handrail whilst turning blue. It was such an unexpected achievement I also walked home later and stopped off at the allotment to collect Madame who’d been pruning apple trees.

Anyway, enough of this misery lit stuff. I noticed the distant hill in the photo as I hurried along the road and I knew that Madame and I had explored the wildlife up there as well as the canal at its foot but aside from that, my geographical understanding of the countryside around Bath is still at the separate places stage. So back home after a cup of tea I put the OS map up on the screen to make sense of the wonderful view.

Jump back say 15 years and I’ve never forgotten a funeral visit I made to an elderly woman who unexpectedly told me she thought we were distantly related. I had no idea how that could be, but she mentioned the village of South Stoke and said there had been Poles (my surname) living there for many generations in the past. The village of South Stoke lies behind the hill in the photo and it is very beautiful. I was inspired to do a bit of research and I discovered that she had been quite right and that little story tied up in my mind with a fleeting conversation I’d had at the back of St Mary Redcliffe church where I was a curate, when a very tweedy lady demanded to know if I was one of the “Somerset Poles”

Meanwhile, and in a previous generation my Dad liked to tell a tale about visiting two old aunts as a young man on a motorcycle “down Cheddar way” who made – as he soon discovered – ferociously strong cider. As he drove home to Hotwells, he said that he lost all feeling in his legs and had to drive into a hedge and sleep until the alcohol (not hemlock in this case) wore off. Here were three very short fragments of an unknown family history. The one troubling detail is that my parishes were in prime cider-making territory, and I couldn’t think of any women who made it. There were such strong folktales about women and their effect on fermentation that even in the early 21st century one old boy I went to to buy cider from refused to let Madame anywhere near his shed. His cider was life threateningly bad anyway and so I never went back with or without Madame – who, by the way – worked for several years in cider research and grew many now rare varieties of tree; which is why she was pruning the apple trees this morning.

By complete coincidence, an apple tree we’ve spent years trying to identify on the allotment site has grown a tremendous crop of small, almost black apples. We picked a couple of fruits today to try to name them. We were told it was a French apple and its name was “l’abris” which could – apart from a whole cloud of further meanings, mean shelter or car-port. I’d never have thought of naming an apple after a car-port. However Madame got to work on the internet this afternoon and has come up with a more likely American candidate known as Arkansas Black. We tried one, and it is delicious and very unusual because for me, at least, it tasted like apples and custard growing on a tree!

So there you go. Apart from the earwax, the thread that may or may not hold this entire post together for you as a reader is trees; family trees, cider apple trees, rare apple trees and the fruits of all of them – cider – a glorious drink as long as you don’t overdo it.

But to return to the question as to whether I am a Somerset Pole, I’ve never experienced the smallest stirrings of nobility in my DNA and so in response to the tweedy lady’s question I answered that so far as I knew I was a Staple Hill Pole which, I accept, was a pretty testy reply. I assumed that she was referring to Lady Margaret Pole whose house, on the Close in Salisbury, we once visited. Her Son, Reginald was the last Catholic Archbishop and got himself into trouble for trying to reintroduce Catholic ritual against the Protestant tide, claiming – in the manner of the overpromoted everywhere – that the people would soon get used to it. They didn’t. Nothing would please me more than to inherit a windfall couple of manor houses from the estate of Lady Margaret, but I wonder whether the tweedy lady was more likely referring to the yeomanry of South Stoke where, for all I know, her deceased husband made a fortune from building motorcycles of the very kind that my Dad fell off. False hopes, I fear, but I love a yarn that begins and ends in the same place. And I’d love to move up a notch from peasant to yeoman.

Catch a bus – it could change your whole perspective on life.

Bath bus station – there are no pretty views!

I’m working up three posts at the moment and hopefully I’ll publish them all by the end of next week One of them is about what I’ve always called “nodes” – which is about places that seem to exude a lot of energy, hopefully without going full leyline over them. Secondly I’m researching a piece on the ways I’m trying to improve my photography to make it more helpful in identifying plants. The third, this one, is about buses and what travelling on then can teach us.

It’s a kind of in-joke among plant hunters that the maps we use to find and record plants are really maps of plant hunters. Cambridge, for instance, has a very high score when it comes to plant records, but it also has a very high score in terms of botanists. Statisticians have had to find some very smart mathematical models for removing the bias. I had a friend, now sadly dead, who was a prolific recorder of wildflowers. I’d describe him as brilliant and difficult, but he was always ready to help me out and taught me a great deal. The thing about him – Rob, his name was – was that he didn’t drive a car and so he travelled mostly by bus or by hitching lifts with other botanists. I’ve been watching a particular group of plants called Fleabanes for several years now. They can be quite tricky to identify and there are three very similar species, two of which grow in Bath and another which seems to be making a slow journey up the river from Avonmouth. So two possible reasons for the slow journey are firstly that the seeds float or blow up the river. Floating is highly unlikely because the Avon flows in the opposite direction. Wind dispersal is more likely because the prevailing wind direction is south westerly and the seeds are like miniature dandelion clocks. But looking at the maps, the records could as easily be explained by their position on bus routes. I’ve seen Rob on his hands and knees searching in the central reservation of a dual carriageway, so it’s entirely possible that the records really reflect bus journeys. I now feel obligated to search for the wandering Fleabane every year to continue his work.

These days I find doing the washing up infinitely more rewarding than listening to the recycled press releases which hide under the banner of journalism in these diminished days. But yesterday I caught several mentions of “the next war” being touted by almost all of them in a brain dissolving teaser for some kind of announcement about building more weapons factories. It reminds me that we all live in a particular cultural context from which we can never really escape. One of my radio producers once told me that she thought my best writing came when I was being lyrical. Well, it’s not a big stretch from being unable to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Babylon) to struggling to find the lyrical voice in a context like this, where lying, thieving from the vulnerable, accepting bribes and trading in weapons that dismember children is regarded as good business.

Rob was finding his lyrical on his hands and knees surrounded by the roar and fumes of fast traffic. Several people, Chris Packham for one, have mentioned hyper focus recently as one of the features of neuro divergence. Perhaps that’s it for some of us, although my own experience is that almost no amount of focus can get me past the feeling of despondency and gloom that this government promotes. If it has a vision at all it’s to spread passivity like a virus through the population.

Anyway, to get to the point – which is about travelling by bus – one of the major causes of passivity is isolation, and that isolation is enforced by illness, poverty, going everywhere by car, wearing headphones and creating your own impoverished environment by doomscrolling on the phone and listening only to your own curated soundscape. A bus, on the other hand is a tin box with six wheels and virtually no suspension which forces you into the company of people you’d never normally meet or speak to. At Bristol bus station a couple of days ago, paramedics were treating someone who’d collapsed on the floor. There were local and international travellers, shoppers and people going home from work looking grey; homeless people, students, schoolchildren and pensioners like us, taking advantage of the free bus pass. There were people of diverse colour and nationality, several slightly deranged people all jammed in, thigh to thigh and standing well inside my usual comfort zone. It’s a challenging and immersive environment in which anything could happen – and I love it. The late night bus is even more gripping. You always get one or two people the worse for wear. One one journey back to Bath there was one man who had no idea where he was; just got off the bus and wandered away in the dark. Another fell asleep with his kebab in is hand and it went all over the floor. Yet another man waved contentedly at his own reflection in the window, half recognizing a familiar face.

The point is – the people you meet on the bus aren’t your carefully curated version of reality but the real thing. Poverty and neglect of the elderly isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet, it’s the old man with his zimmer frame sitting in front of you who hasn’t had a bath or a shower in months and smells so bad that only the smell of a Mcdonalds being eaten by an overweight young person nearby manages to cover the crime like a cheap deodorant. These, dear Mr Starmer are the people you are supposed to be thinking about and working for, but you don’t travel on buses so you’ll never know about them. It’s no use blustering on about the deprivations of your own childhood. Your dad was a toolmaker, and many people will think he made tools like shovels and chisels. But that’s not what toolmakers do. They make the tools which are used in factories to manufacture aeroplanes and cars. Their work is immensely skilled and they have all done long apprenticeships – as long as many doctors. They work in tolerances of fractions of a thousandth of an inch on machines that cost more than a mansion and they are paid accordingly. I worked as a labourer in a tool making company in the 1960’s and they were paid more than double the average wage. They were and probably still are the creme de la creme among engineers because they could work for weeks on a press tool that, if it warped when it was sent off for hardening and cost thousands of pounds. Give it a rest, then, Starmer. All that carry-on about gathering around a single smouldering coal and eating stone soup doesn’t pass the Ernest Hemingway test for bullshit. You lived in a comfortable house and had a good education. Go ride buses for a week – I’d happily buy your pass for the good of the country – and meet the electorate. Get off the bus now and again and learn the names of some flowers; learn Welsh, (I slipped that one in – I never have, but I can pronounce Welsh place names properly; who needs vowels anyway? – work a day or two on a trawler; pick orders in an Amazon warehouse.

So how do I find the lyrical; find peace of mind in a culture of lies, failure and violence. Well, there is still beauty; beauty especially in nature. There is still love; there is still compassion that trickles out from the earth like a spring. It just isn’t coming from the Westminster goon show.

“Where’s the plan?” we ask; “What’s the strategy?”. But as anyone who’s done a management course will know. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Our problems aren’t caused by lack of strategy but by a degraded culture.

For a melancholic, silver linings are just the ephemeral part of clouds.

Naturally, after meeting my targets yesterday I felt like a bit of a celebration but since we gave up alcohol 18 months ago the pub felt a bit weird until we discovered one or two really good zero alcohol beers. It was probably a bad idea. Storm Claudia was still overhead and it had been absolutely pissing down all day but needs must, we thought, and we put on raincoats and walked through the rain to the closest pub. The traffic on the Bristol road was continuous and noisy; punctuated by the urgencies of passing ambulances containing people who – today at least – were not going for a celebratory drink. As we arrived I peeped through the window and I could see an abundance of empty tables which, on extremely sober reflection, should have been enough to turn us around and go home for a cup of tea. But we pushed on through the door. The barman was in conversation with someone and in no mood to break it off. I stood patiently, casting a glance around the empty bar in case there were any banjos or shotguns in evidence.

“Have you got any zero alcohol beers?” I asked as I scanned the empty shelves. He looked a bit mournful. “We’re waiting for a delivery” he said. I could have said “that was the excuse you used last time”, but it seemed churlish to challenge a barman who was probably on minimum wages and was employed by an owner who wasn’t paying his bills. Eventually he found a single bottle of pale ale in the fridge (?) and said there was nothing else. I reluctantly accepted the offer and poured it into its own bespoke glass. Madame had to settle for a glass of apple juice from a box which could have been open for some time. There were however crisps available and they were even in date.

Then, eventually, other customers started to shuffle past in a ghostly, half visible display of sad captains; mostly elderly solitary men who used to be, or do something. One of them came over to us, alarming me considerably, but he just wanted to drop a couple of beer mats off. The atmosphere resembled a funeral director’s waiting room. I drank my pint quickly but Madame was struggling with the apple juice and told me off when I put my hat on. “I haven’t finished yet!” she said. Our son rang and asked what on earth were we doing in the pub on such a filthy night? I couldn’t think of an answer and so we talked about the weather in Birmingham. As we spoke most of the tables, set with four chairs, had been occupied by solitary men. The fire in the lounge bar was not lit, and looked as if it never had been.

We retreated as quickly as possible and walked home. Later we read the reviews but they all looked as if they were written by the landlord’s wife in a last ditch attempt to stop their savings (and probably their marriage) going down the plughole. The flat was warm and welcoming. We should have stayed at home!

Is this a bunch of photos or some kind of electronic reliquary?

Well it’s probably both, but for now I’ll go with the “Caucasian Wingnut” label on the tree. The other photos – in no particular order – are of my lightweight plant recording kit; the view from Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire which I’ve been going to since I was old enough to ride a pushbike and had to climb over a wall to trespass and where I’ve ridden horses, foraged St George’s mushrooms and recorded plants and fungi ever since. It’s also possible, if you walk to the edge of the escarpment, to see nearly all the places I’ve lived in since I was born. There are a pair of “then and now” photos of the cottage we lived in when we were at art school; one picture of our latest allotment; some stored dried and bottled food from it; some pots of tayberry jam and another of Priddy Pool on the Mendip hills and finally a Ragged Robin plant. They’re all extracted from the 20,000 photos I’ve spent 18 months processing down to 1000 botanical records and 500 species – which I’ll finish this week before I start on the fungi.

For the benefit of WordPress and Facebook followers who may be wondering why I’m writing this, I’m trying out a new link to Bluesky since the Facebook algorithm has blocked my posts because their computer has decided that “The Potwell Inn is a business” – no it’s not it’s the title of a comic novel by HG Wells. If the link works properly it should give present and future readers access to the whole nearly 1 million words and associated photos from the past decade. Press that follow button. You know you want to do it!!

@davepole.bsky.social