I use the Welsh name of the Brecon Beacons because that’s what they’re called, and those who object to the correct name are all too often readers of the kind of newspapers that think their role in life is to incite incandescent fury against foreigners of any sort. We have a favourite campsite here that’s close enough to home to be extremely accessible and also fabulous for walks and wildlife. We drove in yesterday and had a brew up and then listened to 13 species of bird in barely half an hour. Dare I make a list? – Blackbird, Chiffchaff, Robin, Grey Wagtail, Mistle Thrush, Blue Tit, Dunnock, Blackcap, Garden Warbler, Wood Pigeon, Goldfinch, House Sparrow, and Raven – all without getting off my chair. Then the braver among the birds swept in while we cooked and ate every crumb of cake that we’d left there for them.
We are escaping from a difficult week with the builders who are treating our black mould; or rather not treating it because they have the habit of scarpering whenever an easier or more profitable job comes up. It’s been five weeks and goodness how many emails and they still haven’t fixed the shutters after they broke them. There was a building firm in Swindon years ago who operated out of a Morris 100o van and called themselves “Bodgit and Scram”. I imagine their slogan was you know where you stand with us!
Anyway on Wednesday we’d been invited to a “Founders Lunch” at Spike Island, the increasingly well-known artists’ studios on the floating harbour in Bristol where I was to make a short speech about how we’d set it up fifty years ago. Madame and I had put an ad in the local paper and asked any artists in the area who needed a studio to join us at an open meeting and we were astonished at the numbers who not only came but were prepared to pay rent on our imaginary studios while we looked for somewhere cheap enough to build them. It’s a long story that travels from flat broke to manageable overdraft and from fractious meetings to – well, probably even more fractious meetings because creatives don’t readily work cooperatively until there’s no alternative. Strangely and beautifully we went back on Wednesday and were greeted by many old friends who’d been tracked down by Bruce and Novvy Allan and discovered that the original artist-led community of our dreams is still alive and kicking. It was a powerful moment to be reunited with a part of our own history which we’d moved on from many years ago. As I said in my speech – it made me feel very proud and very old! Travelling by train – it’s so much quicker – we decided to walk over to Spike Island passing the house we lived in while I was curate at St Mary Redcliffe and then caught the M2 metrobus back to the station after the event finished. It was a beautiful sunny day for walking and after the speeches which encompassed past present and future plans we had a lovely meal in the cafe – prepared by Josh Ecclestone and his team, and some equally good sparkling wine from the Limekiln Hill vineyard. We don’t drink any more but in this instance I drank half a small glass of their biodynamic wine and it was big – if you know what I mean. It was a lovely thank-you. I haven’t kept in touch with the project as much as I should, in fact the last time I heard from anyone connected with it was a solicitor’s letter from a company I’d never heard from threatening to sue me for 1 million pounds worth of damage by a frozen water pipe in the old building. I replied and said “go ahead, I haven’t got two halfpennies to rub together” and the matter was dropped.
Anyway, here we are again in God’s Own Country taking a day’s break before we go for a walk tomorrow to look for interesting plants. In Spring, every plant looks beautiful before the insects, rusts, galls and smuts get to work. Either way they’re fascinating and remind me – as if I needed reminding – that nature is in constant motion and nothing, no-one, lasts for ever.
Hawthorn in its pristine state before the “catastrophe of life” takes hold.
The passageway and steps leading steeply down from the Paragon to Walcot Street
We were lured out by the sunshine this morning and went for a decent circular walk taking in some shopping, a stop off at Toppings bookshop to book tickets for John Wright’s launch for his new book”Grasslands” in May, and then a bit of wall propping overlooking the weir feeling warm for the first time in months. Then another loop up the greatly diminished Walcot street to the top and back along through the Paragon, Milsom Street and home.
Don’t try this at home (or ever)
Going down the steps to Walcot, if you looked closely across the road,you’d have noticed a rather early flowering Greater Celandine in a large pot outside a charity shop. I took this photo ages ago and didn’t think to photograph today’s specimen until it was too late. The thing is, I’d only today been looking today at an entry in a book on Welsh herbal remedies. The section on Celandine comes from a 15th Century herbal translated from the Welsh by John Pughe in the mid 18th century and taken from the tradition of the Physicians of Myddfai – so going back a bit.
A good eye salve. Take vinegar, white wine, the juice of Celandine, and Plantain. Mix them together in a pan and let them stand there 3 days and 3 nights, take it hence, keep it in a box and anoint thine eye therewith.
Here’s the thing, though. Among many other suggested uses, the bright yellow juice of the Greater Celandine is caustic enough to burn off warts and piles. There’s no way on earth anyone could put such a decoction in their eyes without damaging themselves unless there’s something in the recipe or the procedure that the canny doctors failed to share. I’ve got both glaucoma and cataracts (not that they trouble me much and they’re being well looked after by the NHS) but I’m sure that if Andy the optometrist were to lean across me with a mixture of Greater Celandine juice, vinegar and Plantain, and then try to drop it into my eyes I’d be out of the door pretty fast.
That’s the trouble with the reading that I’m doing about Wales and her history. Someone recently alluded to a kind of Cambrian fog that gathers over the culture of the country and leads unprepared travellers (like me) astray if we fail to inspect the teeth of the Bard to be sure that it’s gold and not mercury amalgam glittering between the lines.
We learned the difference between exegesis and eisegesis at theological college. Exegesis means trying to unpick what the original author was trying to say. Doing it properly can feel like unpacking a bottomless suitcase full of ancient garments and figuring out how they were worn. The opposite term, eisegesis, is much beloved by the evangelicals and involves trying to stuff a pair of your own theological pants into the suitcase after discovering that there’s nothing in there that quite matches your prejudices and so you have to chuck out the original contents and their bizarre notions, so you can get more of your ideas in and declare that you have the true meaning of the original.
There’s a phrase that comes from one of the great 20th century scholars of ancient literature who said – if that was what it meant then to the writer, what should it mean to us today? – which is to say that ancient literature and history need to be read with your brain in gear and not uncritically regurgitated as if it had nothing to do with the culture in which it was created.
The events of history are mundane and slippery; evanescent. It takes a poet to land a grappling hook on them and haul them in. It takes a poet to write about them fruitfully and yet another to read them well in vastly different circumstances and even those readings are as evanescent and slippery as the original events. There is never anything but provisional in the pursuit of history, and yet it’s the cultural air we breathe and so we must take it seriously.
I’ve been reading Jan Morris’ book “The Matter of Wales” and the third chapter deals with religious faith in Wales. I found it quite troubling because as she enumerated the waves of religion from the Celtic through Roman Catholicism, post Reformation Anglicanism (both enforced on the Welsh) and then waves of Calvinism, Methodism, Moravianism leading to the 20th century collapse of faith – I realized that in my own way I’d been touched by all of them and even experienced many of them myself. I went through what’s falsely described as Primitive Methodism in Sunday school (the Prims); conventional low Church of England, fiery atheism, Wesleyan Methodism, Evangelical low churches, Anglo Catholicism and theological college on the cusp of the Charismatic revolution. Whatever the light was at the end of the tunnel, they all seemed to swerve away from it when it got too challenging. Pretty well all of them operated a chaplaincy to the status quo. Nowadays if I was forced to put a label on my beliefs it would fall somewhere in the dim space between Celtic Christianity and Taoism but it would be better to evoke the old spiritual doctrine of reserve and apply it to the world in general and the understanding of past cultures in particular. The light at the end of the tunnel for me is the incredible freedom of feeling I don’t have to defend any orthodoxy at all.
Madame and I were sitting in bed today, reading peacefully – she on her tablet and I was immersed in a book by Jan Morris called “The Matter of Wales” the title being a playful use of language in order to indicate the substance, the deep matter of the country. The book was mentioned in Carwyn Graves book “Tir” which I’ve now finished and recommend without reservation as a gentle pushback against some of the more extreme (destructive) advocates of rewilding. For Carwyn Graves the Welsh landscape embodies the history of Wales for better and for worse. History is written in the soil, the rocks and fields; the livestock, the farmers and their lives but especially in their stories and poetry. It’s a beautiful book, and completely by accident I met one of his interviewees in the pub in Bwlch but we only talked about our experiences as writers for the then local Bristol newspapers. As soon as I saw his name in the book I recognised my lost opportunity to talk to an award winning maker of perry – pear cider.
The two books – Graves and Morris take interestingly different approaches to their subject. The landscape for Carwyn Graves is perfused with recollections of the old ways; a form of living history and its lessons for us in the present day. For Jan Morris the landscape is a living being; writhing, roiling, joyful and melancholy by turns. The history here is inscribed in lives lived in the landscape. She’s a magnificent writer on Wales.
So there we were (I mean Madame and me!) in bed reading and we have rules. Silences are only broken by mutual consent – “can I just play this ?….. ” Today she played an old recording of Pentangle – the brilliant Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny Thompson and Jacqui McShee with others – and in something of a Damascus moment I realized I’d left out music, and in what Flann O’Brien would have called a “Keats and Chapman” moment (without the terrible pun at the end); the whole landscape opened in front of me as if I were stood on a mountain top seeing the plains below receding in aerial perspective until the faint blue landscape reached the sea. Of course, you idiot! I thought -it’s language, history, literature, poetry, art, religion, drama and music. It’s the art of the kitchen table and the blackened pot suspended by its crân dân (fire crane) over a crackling fire, the blacksmith, the spinner and weaver, the shepherd, the singer and the traditional doctor, the understanding of plants, the wood carver and the brewer. One of the most inspiring paragraphs in Carwyn James ‘ book is his explanation of the way that in Welsh the word for culture isn’t the cocked finger, class ridden culture from across the Severn – but it also embodies all of the undertakings of ordinary people to advance the experience of being human. So emboldened by this thought I made some coffee, went into my room and guided by some odd instinct searched out a small book about Welsh folk medicine. I’ve known about the Physicians of Myddfai for many years in a more or less superficial way but I had no idea where Myddfai actually is. I had a strong idea of what I was intending to write but (as ever) no idea of how it would shape up so (also) as ever I hunted for a suitable photograph and came up with one I took of one of the three reservoirs which accompany the A470 across the Bannau Brycheiniog passing Pen y Fan. We stopped in a layby there for a brew-up and were joined by a couple of bikers from Merthyr Tydfil on their way to a campsite near Brecon. It seemed to me at the time that this was a near perfect view, but as I looked for the village of Myddfai on the OS map today, thinking to include the physicians who came from that area, I realised that the village was no more than a couple of valleys to the west of where I took the photo, and furthermore the foundational story/myth of these physicians involved a meeting between a farmer and a beautiful water goddess near a lake just like the one in the photograph.
My question would be – is it even possible to understand a landscape or a word in isolation from its whole culture. Many years ago we travelled by ferry and bus down to a small hamlet in southern Ireland for a holiday with friends. One of the friends owned a holiday cottage down there and knew some of the local people. One night we were introduced to two brothers who lived alone in a fairly squalid cottage just up the lane. The two brothers shared a bottle of Guinness with us and clearly thought we were pretty wealthy on account of one of us wearing a new pair of Docs. I had taken a small tape recorder with me and they told stories and sang songs to us provided we returned the offer with songs of our own. Our companions suffered a sudden attack of elective mutism and I sang a supporters song from Bristol Rovers which seemed to please them no end. Just to give a flavour of their lives, they told us that they had advertised in the Cork Examiner for a wife that they would share between them. The ad also generously noted that a pre-existing child would not be an obstacle! Anyway, it became very clear that their stories and songs of the Famine, and of the IRA battles of the past – not to mention a disastrous storm from some time in the distant past – all existed in their minds as if in the present. They sang and spoke of them as if they were still actually happening. It was a powerful example of what I’ve been thinking about in relation to Wales.
The photograph at the top was taken the day after my retirement ten years ago. I remember the journey because our youngest phoned just after the photo was taken with some kind of crisis and we had to abandon our plans and drive back to Bristol where we were still living. The photo and the memory belong together and can’t be separated.
So here I am ten years on, firmly resolved finally to speak and read Welsh. But the conglomeration of these thoughts has led me to the inevitable conclusion that this project goes much further than learning a bit of grammar and some words. The project is a kind of total immersion into the language; the broad culture, history and all the rest, in order that – finally again – I can see the Welsh plants in their broadest meanings, and I can see Welsh food and poetry, history and song as the Hegarty brothers saw their corner of southern Ireland – as essential to their humanity – daft and cruel as that might have seemed at the time. This is what I mean by using the phrase “learning by immersion” because it’s the absolute prerequisite for deep connection with any place in the world.
I’ve done a bit with the words already and I’m pleased to be able to write and say “good morning dragon” in Welsh, although I doubt if there will be any opportunities to use it, and so I’ve switched over to a different but well-connected course which is filling me equally with terror and hope. I can already say most of “I would like to learn to speak Welsh” without having to take a lie down in the middle. Madame has banned me from doing any practice in her presence. Oh and I’ve bought some – well quite a lot of – books. Learning by immersion, you see.
Anxiety can be an awful burden, but when Madame suggested that we might clear off to old town Malaga for three weeks next February I saw the beauty of the idea at once. Our February break in Cornwall this year was completely overshadowed by rain and storms and although we summoned up the good old blitz spirit like proper Brits; even we were unconvinced by our stoicism. So yes – we both thought – renew the passports (we haven’t been to Europe in a decade since a 2000 mile adventure – crossing the Pyrenees in our tiny car three times). Never mind the health insurance says Madame; we’ll get an apartment with a kitchen in the centre of old Town then we won’t have to take a car, and (all in one breath) we can shop at the market, cook our own food and catch trains and buses and ……
Well yes, we’ve been there a few times and it’s lovely and also T shirt warm in February half-term week and we can eat lots of tapas. Last time we went, we read a glowing review for a tiny tapas bar and went to take a look during the day. As it happened, the owner was just sweeping outside and Madame accosted him and asked (rather firmly) if a space could be found for us that night. The owner caved in without a fight, and that evening we passed a long and hostile queue and settled down for some of the best tapas we’d ever eaten. I got talking to one of the locals and he said “he only let you in because you’re English!”
We found an equally good restaurant in Old Town who were offering a taster menu of local delicacies – about ten courses. I should have known better than to order two of them, but I’m a sucker. I was only thrown by the ninth course which appeared to be a pair of gigantic bull’s testicles but which were actually stuffed squid. Anyway sadly – if you’re off in that direction any time soon. (there’s a photo of the place at the top here) – a quick internet search suggests that it’s probably under new management twelve years on, so you’d need to make sure it’s still offering the amazing and totally retro service. But thanks, Hugh Whatley for a brilliant memory.
We happened to be in Malaga on Valentine’s Day that time and we treated ourselves to a meal in the rooftop restaurant at the AC Hotel where the waiter took a shine to us and insisted on treating us to two disabling large brandies on the house. That same week, we were in our room when we heard a strange noise and we raced down to the waterfront where watched and listened to a large marching band processing in a very slow march, while rehearsing for the Ash Wednesday parade. It was almost overwhelmingly emotional even to a case-hardened old pro like me to be in the midst of a performance of such ancient Christian street theatre.
Anyway, all that plus roasted almonds in the street and the quite wonderful Alcazaba Islamic palace and fortress, made Madame’s suggestion a definite yes. Except, that is, until I had the dream last night when my enthusiasm shriveled and puckered like a birthday balloon and I woke as a definite maybe.
We were there together in a market and then suddenly we weren’t together any more. Madame had disappeared on one of her customary missions without mentioning where she was going. I’m very used to it but in an English supermarket she’s easier to find. In the dream it wasn’t easy at all, and as I penetrated further and further into the market it seemed the the stalls were less and less crowded and I could see more of the building, even in the increasing darkness. It closely resembled an Escher painting but although I had my phone in my hand, for some unaccountable reason I decided not to photograph the complex of interwoven brick arches. Before long it was black and I was becoming increasingly anxious without Madame and frankly lost. Then I spotted a crack of light and a door and I left the mysterious market and entered another village market complete with flower stalls. Desperate to contact Madame I grabbed my phone just as I met a rather nice horse. I stroked his nose and without hesitation the horse swallowed my phone. I was aghast; lost in an unknown village without a phone or any clue as to how to get back to where we started. I recall waiting and mercifully the horse vomited up my phone, or rather only half of it, which was the point at which I woke up. For reasons I can’t be bothered to explain I need to take one of my several medications at 4.00am. I’ve got used to it but it does mess up some good dreams.
In my eyes that was the kind of premonitory dream I might have shared with my therapist Robin back in the day, but I knew him well enough to know he’d only throw it back at me and say “What do you think it means?” Well I think it means that we’re just like everyone else. Life is ephemeral and vulnerable and can’t be saved for later like a pension scheme; and what better way of rounding off our lives together than having fun doing what we love while we can still do it.
Today we passed a photo booth where you can get passport photos for a fiver and we both paused but said nothing. I think we’ll be back – however it was a black horse. I hope it got indigestion!
The problem when the Potwell Inn goes on tour is that our plans for a break out invariably involve quite a few bits of kit. So a week before we set out, and perfused with optimism, we attempt to stow as many things as we could possibly need into our little (and rather old) car. The car itself needs plenty of TLC, and the campervan cost us more to run this year than an upmarket old people’s home. So this trip is by car – which entailed getting the brakes serviced and the windscreen wipers replaced in honour of the exceptionally gloomy weather predictions. The forecasts also make most of our longed for plans unattainable so we’ve also packed (just in case) for reading, drawing, mothing, botanizing and watching a load of films on DVD that we seem to remember we enjoyed at the time.
The packing has involved four quite different scenarios. The first is to spend the time walking hand in hand through dappled sunshine; finding and recording rare plants by the dozen. The second is to work our way through our collection of DVD’s and the third is to read a load of pretty impenetrable books. Options two and three may also include lively moments of conflict due to the cramped environment. Alongside all this intellectual stimulation there is the hope that the nights will be mild and windless enough to make a list of moths attracted to the new moth trap. A quick bit of research suggests that with nothing more than a gentle zephyr from a warm quarter and either a bucket of home made sugaring solution or a prolific ivy bush in flower outside the door we may even find a few volunteers for ID including some migrants without appropriate mothy passports. Madame has also packed a large quantity of paper and drawing equipment.
This one’s a 200 mile drive to the Lizard in the extreme South West of Cornwall; proper – next stop America territory. So cameras, head torch, GPS unit and hand lenses are all charged up, the boots are oiled and waterproofed and the laundry revived after the unexpected flood caused by a broken washing machine – is there a theme here? The quills were sharpened; the oak-gall ink and hand-made nettle paper were prepared (maybe I told a tiny lie there). The heat dryer passed silently, surrounded by its favourite washing at the end of December and rather like the two elderly ladies in Laurie Lee’s “Cider with Rosie” the washing machine went into terminal decline when the dryer died. So it was an interesting week.
Madame made pasties on Wednesday last to get our palates tuned for the reckless beauty of Cornish haute cuisine. Stargazy Pie and White Pudding come to mind. We’re working our way through an endless series of named storms and it seems perfectly possible that we’ll have gone through the alphabet by the end of February, so It’s a long way to drive to have your dreams dashed by Storm Zelah. On the other hand when you’re young and madly in love everything is lovely. Sadly we’ve moved on from that bit – well, at least the young bit. Wish us luck!
You’ve no idea how lovely it is to feel well again; to wake up in the morning full of ideas; relishing each day and going out on our walks once more; a bit further each time. I still don’t know with any certainty what was wrong with me but in the end – and by default because they’d looked at every other possibility – I think it all boiled down to iron deficiency anaemia caused by polyps in my colon which were removed by a lovely team at the RUH and then, after a troubled start on iron tablets which initially made me sicker than ever, they were changed for another type and apart from the bother of waking myself up to take them at 5.00am, I feel better than I’ve felt for around 18 months. Hooray for the NHS and the Royal United Hospital ….. and for our GP who started the ball rolling on what must have been a hunch.
So last year didn’t go too well on the travel front – rescued twice by the AA and ignominiously towed home on a trailer; the engine blew up once, cambelt, water pump, clutch and alternator needed replacing and two trips were cancelled before they even began. But that was then and this is now and the van, Madame and me are ready for (amost) anything but especially for a trip to the Lizard which was just ravaged by storm Goretti and lost both water, electricity and internet for a couple of days. We’re staying in a rented clifftop cottage and the photos at the top were all taken through the half-door; the one on the bottom left taken early on the morning of our last departure. Every time we leave it feels like a small bereavement – there’s a bit of my soul living there permanently.
Having spent several years on the neighbourhood plants – Lizard is a botanical hotspot – I’ve just finished fixing up a moth trap. It’s very early in the year and we don’t expect more than a handful of visitors, but in many ways a slow start is the best way for beginners like us. The more projects we embark on, the more the planning resembles a military campaign – laptops, mobile wiFi router and aerial, books, maps, food; cameras, lenses, tripods, kitchen sink. You get the picture. I’ve even bought a new, clonking great monograph on hedgerows to keep me happy if it rains non-stop, and that’s happened on several previous trips.
Eskdale 2019
Taking photographs is only a fraction of the battle, though. Identifying the plant in question is three quarters of the fun. For instance the little darling below was – so far as I was concerned – a white form of death cap that we found on the edge of a wood in Cumbria a few years ago. It’s been labelled and sitting in the photos folder for years until yesterday when I was reading a brilliant monograph on fungi in the New Naturalist series – when I discovered that it also looked very like another fungus known as Destroying Angel which really is white. In the intervening years I’ve learned how to access the massive power of databases and so I checked on the largest I could find and discovered that neither of the fungi is even recorded close to the place we found it, but that even so my initial identification was more likely to be correct. There is a test to distinguish them but of course the subject of the photo is long gone and so it will always remain an unanswerable question.
That’s the thing about nature, it seems far more malleable than we would wish. It would be fairer to say that short of a full DNA profile almost all our identifications are provisional. Like weather forecasts ID’s are correct on the basis of percentages. 100% certainty is rarer than we’d like. Of course that merely means that we should be more modest about our certainties. A couple of days ago we were on a plant hunt and I overheard someone airily identifying a Feverfew with a lot more conviction than I would dare to offer. In fact, the more I learn about fungi the less likely I am ever to forage for them. Both the Death Cap and the Destroying Angel are regularly and fatally confused with edible fungi. No thanks, then, I’ll have the fish fingers!
So, the packing lists are all made and the kit is all checked over, charged up and wrapped. You would think we were off up the Amazon but you need to remember that as a list addict, planning is almost as much fun as getting there. It doesn’t always work of course, we once drove up to Pembrokeshire for a camping holiday only to discover I’d left all the tent poles behind. On another occasion I forgot the air mattresses, and after a trip to the local supermarket we bought a couple of air beds that were so thick and luxurious our noses were almost touching the flysheet.
But at this moment I can hardly contain my excitement at the prospect of waking up to the sound of the sea and walking between fields and hedgerows which – being much further south – are just beginning to wake up. Bring it on! – we say.
For the most part, over the years, I’ve seen New Year more as a celebration that the old year is over and done with and that January 1st is no more than a blank canvas. But this time it was different because 2025 was pretty rubbish, what with innumerable health problems and having to spend a fortune getting the campervan fixed. By the end of the year the health problems along with the van repairs were largely sorted and we were free to resume our itinerant lives; gardening, exploring and recording wildlife and camping unencumbered by worries. It was an exhilarating feeling to be set free to imagine once again. The three resolutions of last year were largely fulfilled and I lay awake making excited plans for 2026.
So after the most optimistic start to 2026, I had a sudden attack of dust and ashes, partially caused by this plant. It’s called Greater Dodder and it was growing so inconspicuously down by the river I would probably never have noticed it. Fortunately the leader of the BSBI New Year plant hunt that we were on, clocked it and we all gathered around to see a very unusual (RR in the books) plant. We’ve seen its much more common relative in Pembrokeshire and North Wales but it was a lovely surprise to see it growing on our local patch. It’s a parasitic plant, related to bindweed (gardeners feel free to hiss) and this one grows especially on nettles.
However the excitement was followed almost straight away by the sense of disappointment that I hadn’t found it for myself. Anyway I photographed it and when we got home looked it up in the books and discovered that it’s been here near the river in Bath for a few years at least and that it prefers growing near water. In fact – to borrow a term from the police procedurals on the telly – it’s got form – a great reminder that the more you know about wildlife preferences the more likely you are to find what you’re looking for.
And so the roller coaster in my brain continued for a while as I pondered how to record it – and as spring follows winter the idea dropped into my mind that it would be a good idea to extend my database to include all the other things we find on our walks; birds, fungi, insects, ferns, slime moulds ( a recent obsession) and lepidoptera because we’ve now got a portable moth trap that won’t take up too much space in the campervan.
It sounds so easy doesn’t it? extend the database which lives in a spreadsheet file so that instead of having to open separate files for each interest, it all sits on one very large spreadsheet so I could, for example, look at everything we found on a certain day, or everything we’ve ever found in a certain place; I could assemble lists for every purpose and even draw pie charts. I was (temporarily) on fire at the possibility of using AI to do all the heavy lifting and slept very badly, basking in the excitement and imagining fine days in Cornwall walking down to Percuil, looking for orchids and listening to the Curlews calling on the mud flats; or in the Bannau Brycheiniog watching the mist below in the valleys or in North Wales feasting on wild mushrooms and watching gannets dive bombing the sea.
That lasted as long as it took to sit in front of the computer and figure out how to do it. My grasp of spreadsheets and how to manipulate them is minimal to non-existent. I am at the sub-beginner level – I just make lists – so I started slowly by finding out that a tab on a spreadsheet is not the same as a tab on a beer can or the one on an ancient typewriter and I set up a new tab (page) marked fungi and tried to copy and paste my list of fungi into the newly named “Biological Records” spreadsheet – oooh posh! – where it promptly fragmented and after a bit of blokey random key pressing disappeared altogether. A frantic reverse ferret move revived the patient but everything was in the wrong columns. It dawned on me that I was in for an agonising long haul – studying things that I really don’t like in order to study better the things that interest me most. No pixie dust, just slog and brain fog like learning to solve differential equations in school.
Dodder – Cousin Bronwyn from West Wales beasting the Gorse.
Self doubt closely resembles Dodder and its cousin in the photo at the top, Lesser Dodder. It coils around your brain and sucks it dry; replacing the creative juices with dust. Like Restharrow – a different tangle of a plant that does what it says on the tin and stops a horse-drawn harrow in its tracks. It’s the curse of all self-taught people to defer instinctively to the careless wisdom of those who had an academic career in gnats’ navels and who believe their qualifications trump the more common muddy boots kind of knowledge gained by the hoi polloi. [That should properly read ….. ‘gained by hoi polloi’ because hoi is the definite article in Greek, but if I wrote it that way I’d be denounced as a pedant]. And so we, the great unwashed, struggle with the pronunciation of long binomial names like Pseudoperonospora humuli and remain silent rather than have a go at it. The trick is to put the stress on the third syllable before the last and say it with conviction. The political theorist and philosopher Gramsci called people like us “organic intellectuals”. It’s a term I’m proud to embrace because it puts me in the company of the miners and railway workers, the millers and machinists and labourers who taught themselves to the highest levels and founded institutes and even invented the health services, ambulance clubs, cooperatives and friendly societies that protected their communities from hardship and exploitation by hard-nosed industrialists, the parasitic human subspecies of Dodder.
After a couple of hours trying to get my head around the entirely unfamiliar vocabulary of computer spreadsheets I didn’t just feel depressed, I felt stupid. I’d still got a mountain of identifications to do with no prospect of getting everything done before the new season kicks off in earnest. But then Madame suggested a walk and that lifted the mood. It’s been very cold with icy winds for days, but there’s been abundant sunshine and we’ve had some lovely walks along the river. Slowly the precious feeling of optimism and hope warmed our fingers and toes and we began to talk about journeys waiting to be made. I will get the spreadsheet working, write my million words and we will make our planned travels around the galleries and churches of Wales to see the cruelly unacknowledged glories of Welsh art. We will hunt for birds and plants, moths and butterflies as if we were in the Amazon jungle, and we’ll dip our feet in the sea again like we did when we were teenagers in awe of the turquoise sea and dracaenas of Falmouth.
Too old for that sort of malarkey? My dears, you have no idea!
Warning. This post includes a discussion of grooming and abuse
We binge-watched a whole four part thriller last night on TV. It was my fault. I fancied something like an Agatha Christie without the drawing room scene and just for fun I used Google Gemini to search for something suitable. There followed a typical AI dialogue where I refined my choice on the basis of a few questions and finally I settled on “near the sea” “cosy whodunnit” “wet weather allowed” and one series dropped into the the slot. It was “The Long Call”, based on an Ann Cleeves novel, set in Devon near the sea (I suspected Braunton Burrows but I couldn’t be sure), complete with rain – oh and one last detail that grabbed my attention – set around a religious community.
And off it went with some great actors and even accurate Devon accents. There was a body on the beach and it all looked very promising until we were introduced to the religious community which was very strict, inward looking and eerily familiar to me. It quickly became clear that everyone was lying and that there was enough passive aggression going on to freeze a small lake. My position as a viewer was so completely compromised that I even imagined myself sitting in one of the chairs in the midst of a Brethren style prayer meeting, listening to the endlessly repetitive petitions of a charismatic leader. I’d been there, worn the T shirt and carried the same alienated feelings as the investigating detective who’d been shunned (that’s a technical term with huge menace) by that same community after he came out as gay when a teenager. It was tremendously well researched in the way that vulnerable people were love bombed and befriended, groomed; then became the victims of passive aggression until they were demoralised, subdued and controlled. The next step, because this pattern isn’t confined to religious groups, is violence, abuse and in the worst case murder.
I was pre-teen, pre-puberty, but nonetheless awash with guilt at sins I didn’t think I’d ever committed – and didn’t have the vaguest idea how to commit – and that I could be certain that I was destined, or predestined for hell. Unconditional love, forgiveness and diversity were as underused in the congregation as a Bishop’s bible, although we all knew that bishops were a bad thing and the torments of hell were always good for a spittle infused, red-lipped sermon. Years later I found an antique copy of the hymn book they used which was so full of sado masochistic imagery it would probably be banned today. If I learned anything at Sunday School it was that I was a wrong un and no-one would answer the question “why?” because that was the sin of disobedience.
I left Sunday School as soon as I was able to defy my parents and took nothing away with me except that diffuse sense of guilt into the future. I caught a glimpse of a better looking god in the local anglican church, but that was more to do with fancying a girl in the choir. I got confirmed, took communion once and never went back. Around that time I was groomed by a much older teenager and introduced to a number of dodgy men but fortunately he was arrested before anything too terrible happened. After that I joined a Wesleyan methodist youth club whose saintly leaders kept me safe. We had a fancy dress party once and Mrs Round said “I suppose you’ll be coming as the devil, Dave” . Finally I discovered the meaning of fornication (Oh happy day!/ what happened there?) and after getting chucked out of school over a provocative samizdat magazine which I wrote, published and distributed I met Madame at a CND meeting and we fell unfashionably but hopelessly in love. I was 18 and she was 15. On reflection I was unbelievably lucky to get off the escalator when I did although that didn’t stop the police, and much later the church authorities from treating me as a risk, mainly to their reputation as worthy chaplains to the status quo.
I was about 12 years old when they interviewed me with the utmost hostility at the police station. My Dad was there, but sat silently throughout and when they let me go he never subsequently mentioned the way they had shamed me. Much later on I was a member of a support group for clergy which was supposed to be completely confidential; a safe space led by two skilled therapists. I finally managed to describe what had happened to me then, and also the occasion when I’d unexpectedly encountered one of the paedophiles I had been introduced to during a visit to his mother. This was very upsetting. Even decades later I recognised him instantly. One of the members of the group took it upon themselves to report what I’d said to the church authorities without even warning me. As a result I was telephoned by a church appointed social worker who quizzed me on what seemed to be the prior assumption that the abused were likely to become abusers themselves. In reality both the police and the church authorities became the abusers, forcing me to recall the events without offering a shred of support afterwards. Any trust in the group disappeared and I was on my own again. Completely innocent and yet groomed to blame myself.
As a consequence of all this inside experience of religious communities and controlling behaviour, a large part of my time has been devoted to patching people up; many of them had been horribly abused and robbed of all self-respect. Many of them drifted right back into abusive relationships, but I think I may have made a difference to a few. After the film last night I went to bed feeling thoroughly churned up.
What is it about religion that makes it so dangerous? so corrosive to young minds? I suspect that living without certainties is hard going so shortcutting from judgements of virtue to the ‘either/or’ rules of us and them is an easy way out of difficult thoughts. Madame and I were down in Southern Ireland once, during the Troubles, and we were in a remote bar way south when a group of IRA supporters came in. It was a terrifying hour whilst we sat and they sang anti British songs, us not daring to speak or get another drink for fear of being recognised by our accents. The next day I went back to apologise to the owner for causing a lot of stress and she said it was no problem. I replied “well, we are English” and she said “No but you’re tourists“. I’m still working that one out.
But there is the real reason for the danger of religion. It’s not theology, it’s the binary culture it generates – with its inside/outside, lost/saved, stranger/friend, infidel and faithful. In a world full of anger and hatred it’s all too easy to fall into camps which become gangs – each with its own flags and banners and then guns and bombs.
This morning we were having a cup of tea with our friend Charlie who managed to combine both creativity and science into his life. We were having a conversation about slime moulds – yes you read that right – and we agreed that the earth is so prodigiously beautiful whether you’re looking at an ocean, a mountain or a microscopic cell; and when we consider the almost infinite adaptations and evolutionary steps involved in getting to where we are – then there really is no need to suppose that some kind of kindly, interfering or even malevolent being, could add anything to the picture. By all means use an obvious metaphor, like Mother Nature for instance but I remember saying to someone once about a girlfriend known by everyone as “Peach” – that her name didn’t imply that she lived in a fruit bowl. The sea of faith seemed to be retreating for me. Much later I discovered that the tide comes in twice a day.
The melancholy soft, withdrawing roar– not, in this instance on Dover beach.
Above is a photograph of a fungus known as Lawyer’s wig; Shaggy cap or – in the full cream version Coprinus comatus. I only mention this because we’ve been reading this week that the Home Secretary is considering abolishing jury trials for many crimes which would previously have been put before twelve randomly selected humans. A more suspicious and cynical person like me might wonder if the real motivation is that too many jury trials of pensioners concerned about the environment or about genocides abroad are being acquitted by juries who refuse to send such obvious terrorists to prison, thereby annoying the Home Secretary greatly. Not just lawyers but many perfectly sane people would argue that it blows a hole below the waterline in the justice system if the determination of guilt and innocence is not assisted by ordinary people using their common sense experience of life and evidence.
I will call in evidence for my point of view, a 10.00 am Wednesday prayer book communion at St Mary Redcliffe church in Bristol where I was a curate many years ago. A Wednesday prayer book communion is not a service which normally draws a crowd. A scattering of enthusiasts maybe, a couple of tourists too embarrassed to get up and leave; leaving a total of eight at the most. It always took place in the small Lady Chapel which saved me from bellowing the obscure 17th century text down the nave like the skipper of a sailing boat in a storm. The other reason for corralling the congregation in a small space is that some communicants like to sit at the back. They come early to sit at the back, and so the distribution of communion can take an eternity as they shuffle achingly slowly towards the altar.
Except on this particular day I arrived from the vestry to find the Lady Chapel bursting with eager but silent communicants. That was the first surprise. The second surprise was that they were all almost identically dressed. They looked as if they’d come off a production line. So I took the service, preached an ad hoc homily with no idea how to pitch it and went to the back of the chapel at the end of the service. I thanked them individually for coming and they were polite and thanked me for my time in voices that seemed as identical as their tweed jackets, polished shoes and pressed trousers. After the tenth or eleventh handshake I plucked up my courage and asked one of them – “Where have you all come from?” – “Oh we’re all high court judges and we’re at the hotel next door on a course.” I said a brief silent prayer that they might be studying diversity.
This photo above is of some clumping fungi which I didn’t identify on the day but which describe the cultural and social uniformity of those judges rather better than I could do in words, and in any case could represent the rear view of my congregation as I walked into the chapel. I was amused when I saw today that I took the picture at Browne’s Folly south of Bath.
So to draw the threads together in case you’re wondering what two sorts of fungi, a congregation of High Court judges and the removal of Jury trials have, it’s the word lawyer. I could add a side dish of folly too. What shocked me that day in Redcliffe was that our senior judiciary could be drawn from such a limited social, cultural and let’s be honest – class – group. That’s without mentioning women or people of colour. In a perfect world we could expect our lawyers, politicians and clergy to understand something of the world of a teenage shoplifter, a single mum who can’t afford a TV license or a rough sleeper who consoles themselves with cheap alcohol or drugs – but we know that’s not the case. Our underfunded judicial system and the prison service which oversees its sanctions are not fit for purpose. The answer is investment, long term planning and far greater diversity; not foolish cuts in an already unjust system that describes peaceful and legal protest as terrorism.
So there’s my yoking together without violence several seemingly unconnected ideas – courtesy of Samuel Johnson’s stupid comment on the metaphysical poets. All because we’re off to the Bannau Brycheiniog and tomorrow night we’ll be looking down the valley towards Tretower Court which has strong familial connections with George Herbert. I love the Metaphysicals!
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 significantdream 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 .
