Category: Art

So where is my existence inscribed?

It’s been a very strange few weeks. I remember vividly from back probably twenty years ago, sitting in a white painted consultant’s room and waiting for him to give me the results of my endoscopy, wondering is this how it always finishes up …… being given the bad news by someone half my age and who barely knows me ? and yet – as it almost always does- leaving with good news that might yet be bad news. Endlessly left processing the words of others for hints of what they know about me but choose not to say out loud. Ironically, it’s always harder to process good news than bad. I left the hospital yesterday after being seen by five doctors and two consultants over the last three months all of whom pored over my arms and my back with their cameras and magnifying glasses and – after I’d signed the consent forms and had the risks explained to me in kindly detail – pronounced the lesions benign and put their scalpels away for another day. I’d prepared myself for the worst and then suddenly I was back on the bus stop with a reprieve. Those youthful months, driving a tractor in full sun with not so much as a smear of sun cream and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts had written themselves on my skin. I am inscribed with the follies of my days of vigour.

So after a ridiculous lunch of favourite things we drove across to the lake at Newton Park and walked together in something approaching silence as I processed the good news; unpacking the bits of the future I’d stowed away in case I wasn’t going to need them. It’s not over yet, of course. I’m still waiting for the results of blood tests, poo tests, urine tests and other tests as yet not invented as the doctors figure out why I’m anaemic and exhausted. I want to throw the word iatrogenic in their faces. “You’re crushing my heart with your beta blockers and extract of foxglove and blood thinners and all the other speculative miracle cures and all I’m suffering from is the casual and unthinking cruelty of the powerful!” I’d like to get my hearing back but the NHS can’t afford the technicians to fit the hearing aids they’ve already prescribed. I’d like to get my glaucoma laser-fixed as promised and I’d like it if the NHS dentist it took ten years to find would use something less dangerous than mercury amalgam to fill my teeth when she wouldn’t dream of treating any private patients that way. But I can’t say any of that to them because any sense of grievance is so dangerous; so poisonous. I’ve seen peoples lives destroyed by the sense of grievance – it seeps through the bloodstream and damages every relationship; sucking the joy out of life and crushing any residue of the lyrical, any feeling of connectedness.

So we go to the lake and sit there quietly watching the swans and moorhens and soaking up the intense late summer light sparkling on the leaves, the grass and the water. The bleached trunks of the dead oaks lining the path never looked brighter or more lovely. And I’m taking photographs of the plants we find – another part of me inscribed with something better than the abbreviated AI notes on my NHS records. The trace of my life divides into two further streams. There’s this blog and then there’s the record of plants seen, loved, identified recorded and photographed. One stream of words and another of data.

Then this morning I went into the kitchen and to my great delight discovered that the sourdough starter I’d completely neglected during these last months has come back to life, greedily digesting the breakfast of dark rye flour that I gave it when I got back from hospital. The future begins with cooking, eating, and sharing. Every saucepan, casserole and bread tin beckons the way forward. I will bake bread, I think, taking a small step forward.

I like the west – if ever I think about going somewhere it’s always west of where I am, and I like water, although I struggle with the notion that nature is somehow beneficial. How does that work? But being in nature is an active process, never passive. Water is where we begin our lives; swimming in an ocean of amniotic fluid. Birth is hard and I wonder if our attachment to water, to waves is a kind of yearning for the way back to that primal, protective warmth. Being born is irreversible and so water and the earth, being closest are the next best thing. Could it be that our first memories are inscribed in water and earth? Could it be that the water and the earth remind us of the before and beyond of our existence and that – surprisingly – we find it comforting?

It’s late summer so there are berries. We passed (and I photographed) spindle berries, hawthorn berries, sloes, damsons falling across a garden wall, blackberries and of course elderberries, which I forgot to photograph because stupidly I neglect the things I know best. There’s no better investment in the future than making jams, preserves, pickles, sauces and ketchups. Somehow they throw a line of engagement into the unknown, an investment in the likelihood of our being around to eat them. Hiding amongst them all are the darker natural notes – deadly nightshade, enchanters’ nightshade, woundwort, bittersweet which all prefer the shade and which it pays to know well. Your liver will thank you for your diligence.

But above all, we are inscribed in the people we love and who have loved us, occasionally for almost a lifetime. Parents, grandparents and (sometimes) children too, our partners of course who carry the bad and good of us because they love us, and the multitude of people we encountered and paused to be close to – to take their load if only for a while; to share a life giving thought or to dare to challenge. Our teachers, mentors and friends are inscribed in us as we are in them and it’s good!

Words really matter

Beautiful Demoiselle on the Monmouth and Brecon canal

I was inspired to write to the Guardian letters page many years ago to take issue with Waldemar Januszczak over a piece he’d written loftily dismissing the worker writer movement (in which I was locally active at the time). He’d dismissed the whole idea of working class writing with a contemptuous wave of his silk scarf. The Guardian is one of those media outlets that has never understood that its constituency largely comprises that group of people who are totally unaware of life outside their bubble, and I return again and again to an idea I’ve carried for decades which says that it’s what you say when you’re not thinking that betrays your true personality. Not thinking led a colleague of Madame to pronounce on the situation in Russia during the Yeltsin era, saying there was no poverty there and cited as evidence that the local Starbucks in Moscow was usually crowded.

Recently, a Guardian piece described the people who go out with electronic devices searching for treasure hoards as “Hobbyists”. Had the writer paused even for a moment to consider the inappropriateness of that word “hobbyist”? In the writer’s defence they might argue that they were saying there’s a place for the aforementioned hobbyists to make a (tiny and supervised) contribution to professional archaeology. “Oh gosh – anyone for coffee? mine’s a macchiato Tracey” . Forty years ago I worked as a part-time instructor in a prison. One of my class members was a little and very volatile Welshman who was doing nine years for an affray in which a TV went through a window and one of the protagonists was dangled through the same one. The thing about him was that he was one of the greatest experts on Roman British settlements I ever met. People can be much more complicated than the parodies we invent when we’re not thinking. I remember saying to one particularly nauseating man who’d found more Jesus than me (or could it have been the tea and biscuits?) – “don’t patronise me; I’ve been patronised by much better Christians than you.”

Hobbyist, then, and how about amateur? another word that the insiders use to put the outsiders in their place. Did you instantly recognise the damselfly at the top of this post? Bob Talbot would have known instantly – another man who would never make it to the church Oyster Supper, but who ran a fishing tackle shop in Bedminster, tied flies for pleasure and took me under his wing when I was struggling with my work. I would take the ten o’clock communion in the Lady Chapel wearing my fishing gear and wellies under a long cassock, and dash straight through the house discarding my clericals and out through the back garden gate where Bob would be waiting in his three wheeler to take us out to a river or a lake somewhere. He said to me once “you can keep your god, Dave; this is all I need to be at peace.” On tough days I would go round to the shop and sit with him drinking coffee and setting the world to rights.

And as a beginner field botanist, (my retirement dream) ; although I was fortunate to find a very few highly skilled people who were willing to share their expertise, there were all too many – often retired professional academics – who consistently undervalued the contribution of thousands of unpaid volunteers who had no formal qualifications but were happy to put the hard miles in to record the ordinary and everyday plants without which we’d have no idea what is going on with climate change. You’ll never understand what rare is until you’ve mastered the common to contextualize it.

We’ve become sensitised to personal pronouns, the he and she, his and her bear-traps for careless talkers and that’s a good thing even if it does lead to some hilariously mangled conversations at times. If we must hurt people’s feelings and diminish them as human beings then at least let’s do it deliberately; be proper bastards and own our stupidity. Let’s banish the class-based hierarchies and accept that when the shit hits the fan we need an engineer not a colorectal consultant.

Words can encourage, inspire and move us but they can also belittle and demotivate us. I’m a writer and words, to me, are precious so I get angry with people who use them carelessly, thoughtlessly or untruthfully. A crime against language is a crime against our humanity. So let’s be clear – the only appropriate use of the word “amateur” should be when someone isn’t paid for what they’re doing and regardless of their level of expertise. As for “hobbyist” I can’t see it in any sense except for the purpose of belittling someone. In truth, if it weren’t for unpaid volunteers we’d barely know the extent of environmental damage and species depletion we’re causing. Yes, of course, the number crunching is a bit specialised and the drawing of subsequent conclusions from the data needs keen scientific antennae, but even those more rarified tasks are often being carried out by unpaid volunteers because the government and its ministries know that the best way to solve a problem is never to investigate it – just so that some smarmy politician can say (hand on heart) “there’s no evidence”. “Of course there’s no evidence you clown!“- I might reply – “because you refuse to look for it“.

But we, the great unwashed, will look for the evidence and teach ourselves the skills to do it well because there isn’t any other way.

Even 9mm can be a diagnostic factor.

Just bants mate, no offence intended.

Part of the Lleyn Pilgrim’s Way near Rhiw

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

GK Chesterton “The rolling English road” 1913

I suppose it was just what might be called light hearted banter, but Chesterton’s suggestion that ancient roads and tracks are the result of drunkenness is so way off beam. It’s also evidence of a mindset that’s at least one of the underlying causes of the state we’re in. The truth is, our forerunners and ancestors had an utterly different relationship with the landscape and there’s a far more important reason for winding roads than the suggestion that they were too pissed to make them straight.

We just got back from north Wales where the second half of our stay was in a rather inaccessible cottage on the steeply sloped side of Mynydd Rhiw below the hamlet itself. We were also on the footpath that’s been designated as part of a Pilgrims’ Way. Let’s not get too carried away by that designation because pilgrimage is becoming big business for pubs, cafés and anyone with an empty transit van willing to shuttle pilgrims and their luggage between sections. However Bardsey has been a pilgrim destination for centuries and these miles of track intersect with any number of sacred places. Since Chaucer’s days pilgrims have been a grand mixture of the pious, the curious, the culpable and lost souls looking for some spiritual treasure.

By reason of age, infirmity and knee replacements, the steep path became – for five days – the only way back to the car, and the best available nature reserve. I completely fell in love with 400 metres of stone wall and its associated plants. Breathless and a bit arthritic I had to stop every ten or fifteen paces in any case on the extremely steep slope and so a bit of botanising was inevitable. I even made a list, and I was necessarily directed into a thoughtful appreciation of the people who built the accompanying wall. Five feet high in most of its length and huge boulders- the largest at the base. Some of the stones were so large they would have needed the combined strength of half a dozen strong men. Some were obviously there already.

These walls are quite different from the many other regional styles, and the reason of course is that walls were built with whatever was immediately available and to-hand. In Wiltshire and Gloucestershire there’s a lot of flat brash; and in other parts there are flat slabs of slate. An experienced stonewaller could probably tell you where a particular wall could be found – just from a photo.

But look again more closely, and what you see is the most marvellous habitat for insects and small mammals. One highlight of our time there was to find a couple of bits of scat – poo – that possibly came from a stoat; black, and rich with the blood and bones of its prey and pointed at the ends as we discovered is the sign of a carnivore.

In the lee of the wall a pilgrim might have sheltered from the storms that regularly blow in from Hell’s Mouth bay below, and of course a large number of plant species were enjoying the comfort and warmth that a wall brings. But more important to my argument here was the sinuous course of the wall as it descended the hill. The reason wasn’t hard to imagine. The builders obviously took their stones from next to the proposed course of the wall, thereby creating a pronounced hollow, the grass punctuated by protruding clints waiting to turn an unprepared ankle. These builders must have had the strength of oxen. It’s all well and good to lift 200 lbs a couple of times in the gym, but to lift similarly heavy, muddy and irregular stones all day; time after time must have shown awesome stamina. However now and again they must have encountered rocks weighing far beyond their capacity. I’ve seen it suggested that they could have shattered stones using fires and water but here on the side of a mountain there were none of the makings for such technology, and so they just went around them. They read the landscape and bowed to the facts on the ground.

There’s a whole spirituality in that obedience to the landscape; a kind of Tai Chi approach to building a wall; bending and turning to the superior force of nature. When the Romans came they used their technology to dominate the landscape, building straight roads across the country. It’s a habit we’ve never shaken off in spite of it being so wasteful of human energy. We waste our strength and precious resources by demanding that the earth bends to our will, when the ancients accepted that as a part of the whole of nature we’re limited in what we can demand. So here are some of the perfectly ordinary plants that lived under the shelter of the wall, only occasionally observed by pilgrims in search of the meanings that have always just slipped away. As RS Thomas described it in one of his poems, it was like putting your hand into a hare’s form and feeling the warmth although the hare has always just fled.

After Fern Hill

Is poetry – or maybe drawing, painting: is any manifestation of creativity catching; is it contagious in the sense that being close to one of the inspirational places or people could arouse a sleeping talent within you and bring it to birth? This morning I was making tea in the kitchen here on Lleyn and wondered for a (very) brief moment if – after so many years of scepticism – such an idea might have a sliver of truth in it; because thousands of people believe something similar. How many visitors to Bath secretly buy an extremely expensive notebook or a new and hideously expensive fountain pen for the beginning (inspired by Jane Austin of course) of a new novel? How many visitors to St Ives seal their resolution to learn to paint with the purchase of a watercolour sketchbook at an eye watering price? I share the temptation of course but never believed in the magic until this morning, while making the tea and my mind filled with Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas’s famous poem.

Here’s me, blathering on in full romantic flow about RS Thomas whilst staying in his North Wales parish, putting the teabags into the pot and thinking about a poem by a South Wales poet. For a brief orgasmic (i.e. it didn’t last long) moment I thought I’d contracted poetry by contagion. Later I looked out of the window and counted four ferns – Male fern, Hart’s-tongue fern, Maidenhair spleenwort and of course Bracken all close to the back door. The winner, naturally, was the bracken which drives out all other competitors.

Competition plays a big part in plant life. I also spotted one of the smallest Dove’s-foot cranesbill I’ve ever noticed, growing close-cropped on the well maintained lawn. Another struggling plant caught my eye at the same time, this one a Navelwort barely two inches tall, subsisting on a bed of moss. To grow a fine plant we need to provide sufficient food and light and a suitable environment. But we tend not to think that the same criteria apply to poets and painters. You can read a dozen biographies of successful artists and writers without once being told about the family money that kept them afloat. The persistent and useful myth of artists starving in garrets fills in the many gaps in the ledgers of the famous. The upshot is that many self-effacing little gems are passed over in favour of the big, the tarty and the obvious; the Dahlias and Gladioli of the creative arts.

Navelwort, the leaves shrivelled by drought

So do I think the gift – whatever it is – can rub off on another person? Well yes I do, but not by visiting their haunts, drinking their favourite beer or buying a printed coaster in the local gift shop. Not will the gift embrace you when you arm yourself with pen and ink or laptop and sit there gazing into space waiting for some inspiration somehow to descend on you. But reading and studying their work with real emotional intensity does at least help you to discern something of the vision that drove them. Out there, in the world of the ten thousand things – as the Taoists say – are all the pieces of the puzzle. We just have to be patient until we’ve found them.

Dove’s-foot cranesbill, constantly shorn by the mower.

The long view

The Snowdon range from Rhiw

We’ve moved just over ten miles to a very small cottage on the side of the hill above Porth Neigwl which, in English is rendered as Hell’s Mouth on account of the number of ships wrecked there in South Westerly storms. We’ve been down to the long dune fringed beach in severe storms, and seen how the sea can be almost overwhelmingly dangerous. The Welsh name might also be translated into gateway for the clouds – a name we can also vouch for. This part of the peninsula, with Mynydd Rhiw on one side and Mynydd (mountain) Cilan on the other, seems to attract and embrace banks of low cloud and sea mist in its long arms, mist that, with luck, will burn off during the day. There’s an irony in the photo because we struggled without success to make the telly work last night and it wasn’t until we looked at the photo that we realized there was a satellite dish on the wall. Wrong socket error!

A third quarter moon above Aberdaron last night

We’re looking down from the garden towards Sarn y Plas below us; the cottage owned by the Keating sisters who allowed R S Thomas, priest and poet to live there after his retirement from Aberdaron. The church authorities refused to allow him to remain in the vicarage next door in spite of their having no use for it. Madame noticed some days ago that it was in disrepair, and a drive around it today confirmed the very poor state of the roof. I find it very hard to believe that the church had so little understanding of how celebrated he was as a poet, even though they must have known that his eccentricities led many village people to dismiss him as a “miserable bugger” . The church on the beach in Aberdaron does its best to give pilgrims somewhere to see and hear the reality of his poem “The Moon in Lleyn” , and there’s a small upper room in Llanfaelrhys church with a peaceful feeling and a fine view of Bardsey. In the churchyard his wife Elsi, his son Gwydion, the Keating sisters and the poet and acquaintance, Jim Cotter are all buried. It’s a windy and often cold place for visitors to meditate. Even Sarn y Plas, his old retirement home is under plans to open it to the public, but there is no sense that the church authorities or the village itself is prepared to treat him and his work as much more than a side-hustle. The old vicarage could be redeemed with some restoration and a permanent exhibition. The Keating sisters, who lived almost next door at Plas yn Rhiw, on the remote estate where we’re staying, were equally disliked by many for their opposition to potential caravan sites in the area and even bought up land and gifted it to the National Trust to prevent any further development of tourism. They united in opposition with RS and many others to a nuclear power station being built in Edern up the road, and to military development down on the dunes where bombing practice took place during the war. RS was rumoured to have supported the arson of second homes in the area but no evidence was ever presented. He was a fierce Welsh Nationalist without doubt, leaving ample evidence, sadly, for the the fact that those with most to gain from the destruction of this beautiful place wanted him and his campaigns gone for good. The church, as chaplains to the status quo, wrung its hands and hid the bibles in case anyone ever read them properly.

So, inspired as I’ve been by his brutally honest poetry, it’s pretty cool to be here in the midst of it. I’ve already mentioned his poem “The Moon in Lleyn” which shares a kind of melancholy tempered by hope with Matthew Arnold’s poem “On Dover Beach” which could as easily have referred to Porth Neigwl. But before we get too carried away by the melancholic solitude of this extreme Westerly point, it’s sensible to remember that beneath the hillside where I’m typing this, lies a lode of manganese ore that led to one of the biggest manganese mines in Europe for a while. For all I know this cottage could have been built for a quarryman and his family who would have lived here many decades before RS came to minister here. I could walk across the top of the mountain, which isn’t very high at all, and in ten minutes drop down into the valley beyond, where there are abundant signs of the old industry. I suspect RS would have hated the clanking of the overhead cable lift down to the waiting ships below; the pollution and the whole bleak rust-belt atmosphere of it. However passionate a priest he was, he would never have regarded himself as a missionary; more of a Jeremiah perhaps!

And today, sitting in the pub opposite the church with the smell of hot cooking oil drifting past and hundreds of tourists looking for something to do, I know he would have hated it just as much. The environment has recovered from the mining and could recover perhaps from mass tourism and caravan sites, although there’s talk of another nuclear power station on Anglesey. Despite the best efforts of RS, the Keating sisters, the National Trust and thousands of Welsh Nationalists, his world was a temporary one. The other night we were driving down to Porth Oer for a walk and we even surprised a hare which ran down the road in front of us and bolted into a field. Another poem brought to life. The soil here is slightly acidic and I’ve been finding Heath Bedstraw and Harebells, not to mention orchids on one of the dune lined beaches. It’s still awesome but overhead the bombers still make training flights

It would be easy to put on a pessimistic air and claim that – therefore there’s no point in resisting change – and our local (but thankfully no longer) MP Jacob Rees Mogg was dubbed minister for the 18th century by one journalist for wanting to reintroduce imperial weights and measures. But battles such as engaged RS can last for a generation or even a century, outliving our own disappointments but ultimately vindicating our campaigns. There’s no need to accept the judgements of our contemporaries who will, soon enough join Dante’s bishops in the circle of hell especially reserved for those who didn’t give a shit. All we can do is hold on to the good we can still find and keep the hope alive for the turn of the soft withdrawing roar of the sea.

Oh and this – one farmer’s investment in the future:

Back on Lleyn no heatwave.

The Beach and cliffs at Aberdaron

While the rest of the country is apparently melting under 30C plus temperatures we’re sitting under thick Atlantic clouds and sea mist for most of each day. It seems to brighten up for a couple of hours in the afternoon – so poor sunbathing weather but excellent for walking and mooching around looking at plants. We’re a mile or so away from the nearest village and eight miles from a very good supermarket in Nefyn which deserves an award for its community spirit. They cook a daily hot lunch, and every day customers queue for a decent takeaway meal at a very reasonable price. They also support local businesses – farms and dairies and (in this last bastion of the Welsh language) show no signs of tourist fatigue. They’re also very adept at recognizing us and speaking English before we’ve even spoken. Must be something about the way we dress! I’ve yet to say ‘thank you’ in Welsh (‘diolch’) for fear of provoking a conversation. Far from the stereotypical view of the Welsh we’ve always found people extremely friendly and helpful. What still remains a challenge is the long history of asset stripping by the English (think coal, slate, minerals and especially water) and the scandal of second homes. A couple of years ago I had a long chat with a local farmer’s wife and she quizzed me quite fiercely. We parted on friendly terms after she asked me “but if you lived here would you learn to speak Welsh?” and I answered “In a breath!” – and it’s true. As my old Greek tutor, Gerry Angel once said – “there are only two languages worth learning, Greek and Welsh” – but I should add that he was an ardent Welshman. I had to learn to pronounce Welsh place names when I was running a writers’ group in South Wales and needed to travel everywhere by bus. Welsh has the great advantage of having phonetic spelling so once you’ve learned a few basic rules about sounds and stresses, you can find your way to Ystradgynlais without provoking amusement among the other passengers.

The Lleyn peninsula, the thin strip of land that leads west from Snowdonia into the Irish Sea, is – if you’re a poetry reader – RS Thomas country. He was vicar of Aberdaron for many years and became a campaigning Welsh speaker even though he only learned the language as a young man. Like many reformed smokers and drinkers he out-did most people in the ferocity of his new attachment to Welsh and (according to the excellent biography “The man who went into the West” by Byron Rogers) even berated the local butcher for labelling his meat in English. I met RS once at a reading and he was charming, although his bone-dry sense of humour could be misleading to anyone unable to tune in to it. I was far too awestruck to say anything sensible to him but I’m still in love with his work which is all in English because he never felt confident enough of his grasp of the nuances of the Welsh language to write poetry in it – the complete opposite of Samuel Beckett who wrote in French after 1945 because (he said) it allowed him to write without style.

Elsi, Thomas’s wife and a fine artist in her own right, is buried above Aberdaron in the bleak churchyard of St Maelrhys Church, Port Ysgo, with their son Gwydion; near to the grave of Jim Cotter who was also Vicar of Aberdaron and a pioneer of modern liturgy as well as being a significant campaigner for gay rights in the church. I knew Jim quite well from some of the retreats he led; a delightful man. Yesterday while out walking near Rhiw we met a couple whose next-door neighbour RS had visited regularly. Apparently he would often bring a piece of cake in his pocket when visiting. Local opinion about him was always divided. Some thought him a saint and others thought he was “a miserable old bugger”. His bishop and the church in Wales hierarchy had no grasp of his gift so they hated each other cordially and refused to let him continue to live in his house when he retired. The house now appears to be empty and there’s a hole in the roof (reported by Madame as we drove past) , so it seems the churches’ incapacity to cope with gifted and creative clergy is undiminished.

Elsi and RS Thomas were great friends with the Keating sisters who owned the estate of Plas yn Rhiw. They too lived pretty austere lives in their house (now owned by the National Trust) and when we visited it in 2019 I was very moved by finding, in their kitchen, a very similar paraffin stove to the one my grandmother had in her cottage in the Chilterns. The Keatings had Plas yn Rhiw extended and some of the furnishings including a fine staircase were salvaged by Williams Clough Ellis who also designed an extra floor for them whilst not working on the italianate village of Portmeirion.

So to cut a very long story short, we’re moving later this week to stay for a few days in a rather inaccessible and tiny cottage on the National Trust estate, overlooking Porth Neigwl bay within easy walking distance of Plas yn Rhiw, The Thomas’s retirement home – Sarn cottage, and St Maelrhys Church all joined by footpaths across the abandoned manganese mines I mentioned a couple of days ago. How much good fortune is proper in such a short visit. Thomas’s poems speak to me and often kept a few embers of faith smouldering in me when I read them during hard times in the past, because unlike the prophets of Baal and all their certainties he practiced doubt, uncertainty and steadfastness in the face of an overwhelming emptiness. It has a posh theological name – kenosis – but I prefer Wittgenstein, “whereof one one cannot speak thereof must remain silent” or perhaps the Taoist saying – “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao”.

Sunset over the Monet and Brecon canal

Madame and I have exchanged words about whose idea it was to take this picture, but it was me that pressed the button. The resemblance to a Monet painting only occurred to us over breakfast this morning. The impressionist blobs of Hogweed and Nettles; the solitary clump of Reed canary grass and – if this were an ultra high definition photo – the little cloud of mating Mayflies; balanced by the streaks of cloud and the bright gaps between the leaves; even the composition leading your eye towards the horizon and the hills around Brecon.

If you look very carefully you might be able to see a low wall alongside the small road leading west towards Llanfrynach, and if you had walked up there last night you would certainly seen a farmer and tractor carrying large bales of hay back across the canal to his barn; he with a broad smile on his face as he sang (inwardly) a hymn of thanksgiving in Welsh for the harvest snatched from the jaws of global weather disruption. I gathered my watery eyes and snot soaked features into a smile as he passed, trailing clouds of pollen behind him. It’s been a tough week for plant hunting – hot, sweaty and malignantly pollen-rich, and necessitating my taking industrial quantities of asthma inhaler and paracetamol. This is the second time we’ve camped in Wales during haymaking, and the other one didn’t end well either!

Anyway, enough wheezing for now. I was particularly interested in the canalside wall because I’ve been reading the most marvellous book called “Urban Plants” by Trevor Dines, only published last week and I’m not on any kind of commission here! In it, there’s a chapter on walls and so my eye was drawn immediately to the one on the canal where to my great delight I found three more plants I’d not recorded before – by no means rare, but new to me – I’m not a twitcher. In addition to the grass I’ve already mentioned, there was a vetch and a couple of new stonecrops. Being a good (non-practising, lapsed) Protestant I still need to balance every moment of pleasure with a good deal of hard work which, yesterday, included several email conversations with other botanical friends who know a lot more about plants than I do. So welcome to my spreadsheet numbers 727-729, we all hope you’ll be very happy.

Anyway it was an idyllic and peaceful end to the day and a decent night’s sleep on top of the duvet. But this morning I celebrated the new day with the thickest, blackest, sweetest and bitterest cup of coffee ever made.

I’d forgotten, but we’ve been carrying this little mocha coffee maker in the campervan for so long that I only found it accidentally while I was clearing out the cupboard last week. Madame has always made fun of me because on one of our first ever camping trips to the Lizard, we struggled across the fields with a cafetiera and my portable typewriter. by now, sixty odd years later I can understand why the typewriter, but the coffee apparatus is some kind of transitional object. For goodness sake I don’t even like the life-threateningly sweet tar of its gurgling infusion, just the smell gives me palpitations – but that cup of coffee in the morning with its big spoonful of sugar somehow girds my loins (if you’ll forgive the imagery). A slice of toast and home-made bramble jelly, a very small cup of the distillate of hell and I’m ready to write. I feel like a writer.

Nine tenths of writing isn’t the perspiration bit, it seems to me, but in noticing. It’s an almost pathological interest in the tiniest things that cross your path – for instance …… what are those nettles and that hogweed doing there looking pretty in the photo? They’re both of them opportunist, thuggish colonisers of disturbed ground. At least half of the peaceful and lovely rural idyll probably looked like a mud-bath a year ago. Someone’s been doing some earth moving. Why does that plant on the wall look so like the rare one I found on a supermarket wall in St David’s several years ago? Because they’re closely related but not the same. What about this one with similar leaves but loads of dead stalks standing up? – same family, again different cousin. You have to be careful with cousins and families.

Anyway, we’ll be back home soon and then off to North Wales. Right now I’ll be putting on the kettle, filling the water tank and emptying the cludger – oh joy!

Only the yew trees know the whole story

St Meugan’s Church Pencelli

I suppose some might find churchyards rather melancholic places. but not me. We were walking alongside the Monmouth and Brecon canal when we saw the road sign which indicated a church half a mile up the hill. It was more of a Welsh mile and a steady climb of 200 metres, passing an adventure centre and a lot of sheep before we came upon the church which is so large as to hold a population much larger than the little collection of houses around and about which wouldn’t even amount to a hamlet’s worth. It was a blistering hot june morning and we passed a group of walkers descending who said there was a good bench up at the churchyard and that sealed the deal.

I’ve spent a lot of time in and around churches and the first thing that caught my attention was the broadly circular wall to the churchyard. This is an often seen feature of Saxon churches which stood on repurposed pagan sites. Churches dedicated to St Helen (Emperor Constantine’s mother who once revivified a corpse with a piece of the true cross that she’d bought from the local relic market) , for example, were almost all situated on springs and one of our neighbours hired a dowser who managed to locate the spring at what would have been my local parish church before the congregation all moved away to work in the quarries.

The walk up a narrow lane to the church was a botanist’s dream, notwithstanding the worst hay fever I’ve ever suffered from. I dripped, sneezed and coughed my way up the long hill taking photos while Madame walked on ahead. By the time we reached the church gate I’d found five species of wildflower I’d never seen before. The circular churchyard and the yews reputed to be more than 2000 years old suggested that this squarely built church sitting silently in the hillside has a history reaching back through beyond the Roman period. Holy places are like that. We find ourselves being drawn to them, never quite knowing why. I’ve always thought that they function as lost property offices frequented by people like me who can’t even fully describe what it is that we’ve lost.

The guidebook came up with some facts and recalled some of the tragedies that the church has seen, including the deaths of family wedding-party who, in 1753, drowned while attempting to cross the river Usk. Outside the church a patch of grass was reserved for the playing of handball, and a pit for cockfighting – forerunners of the creche and free coffee with damp biscuits after the service, favoured by modern clergy.

Outside, a fallen yew tree has been turned into a noticeboard worthy of Antoni Gaudi.

But as I wandered around the churchyard I chanced upon some plants, presumably garden escapes or maybe sown on purpose. I knew that if they were truly naturalised and “wild” they would have been exceptionally rare, but after a few moments the more likely thought came to me that they’d been deliberately put there; safe behind the railings of a pair of listed chest tombs and as symbols of the resurrection just beyond the reach of strimmers and zealous gardeners. The plants – Jacob’s Ladder – were there in three colours, blue, purple and white; a kind of living bible class for those who care to stand and stare. Jacob’s ladder on which, in his dream, Jacob saw the angels ascending and descending to earth. It’s a potent symbol in a churchyard even now – subtle and creative, even a bit subversive.

The aesthetic gift of plants

A stacked focus macro photograph of the prickles on the cactus that lives on my desk

This is turning into something of a series. On January 5th I wrote about the plants being markers of the passing seasons after walking down a lane towards the beach here in Cornwall; none of them rare in any sense but all capable of lifting your heart as an avatar of spring. On 6th January I wrote about plants and their properties as irreplaceable sources of as-yet undiscovered drugs; but I warned that they’re also the canaries in the environmental coalmine warning us clearly about the danger of our extractive and instrumental abuse of nature. Then on the 7th January I turned towards the difficulties but also rewards of a meditative relationship with plants and nature as a whole. Notwithstanding the difficulties of talking about “soul” and “spirituality” I asked whether a loosely Taoist spirituality can build a deeper relationship with the earth and creation without resorting to religious fanaticism. Is there a way into a green spirituality that honours Wittgenstein’s wise aphorism – * “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” ? or perhaps more simply, can we ever attempt to explain mysteries without distorting and diminishing them?

So today, in the fourth of these I want to address another gift that plants bring to us – their sheer beauty. Anyone who’s ever loved a William Morris wallpaper or fabric design will understand his debt to natural forms. Any ceramic artist must surely be especially inspired by the natural forms, textures and colours of fungi. Any painter could learn how to replicate the colours, and any sculptor the forms of these exquisite parts of creation that were growing here long before the first hominids evolved and will still be here and still evolving long after we’ve gone the way of the dinosaurs. I don’t write this as a knockdown stand-alone argument for preserving nature, but I believe that the aesthetic can’t be left out of the argument because it’s the aesthetic dimension that helps us to value those parts of life that can’t be reduced to money. If you ask the question “what is a Cowslip worth?” could anyone respond fully without mentioning its beauty, its history, its place in the scheme of things? The value of a wildflower meadow could never be expressed without including its aesthetic dimension except – I write this with a heavy heart – a property developer who might pay lip service to its “recreational value” by offering to build a playing field somewhere else – a promise that will be waived away by the local planning authority if the developer pleads that they can’t make a profit unless they build on the football field too!

And if I might sound off a little bit longer, if we all watched nature programmes on TV from dawn ’till dusk, seven days a week, we’d be in danger of being as ignorant of nature as we were when we were born. Television is inherently passive entertainment more or less presented as education. The real stuff is out there in the cold and rain or, with a bit of luck, on those warm summer evenings when once, in France, I grumbled because a churring Nightjar was keeping me awake in my tent. Real nature is sensual, tactile and mucky, and it demands patience and fierce concentration as well as some ultra rewarding book-work.

When I was learning to do botanical illustration (I never got very far but it taught me the value of close attention), I took dozens of close-up photographs of a Hyacinth so I could paint it using just three colours. This is a great exercise for anyone to try. I’ll never be a William Morris, but I’ll never again dismiss a Hyacinth from a supermarket as “just a Pot Plant”. As I went through my albums looking to pick some appropriate photographs for this post, it occurred to me that one other gift from the natural world to us is to inflame our curiosity. But that would demand a separate post.

*Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The Potwell Inn New Year quiz – answers below

First image – which kind of Wild Carrot is this?

Second image – what’s so fishy about this?

Third (Bindweed) what’s the significance of the little pointed bit between the two reddish leafy things?

Upper fourth – Which children’s’ book character shares a name with this plant?

Lower fifth – which word does this plant share with the one above?

Left upper sixth – What part of the body shares a name with this fern?

Left lower seventh – what’s wrong with this Strawberry?

Right eighth – where would you look for this plant?

Left ninth – What punctuation mark shares the name of this butterfly?

For the photo at bottom right, check out the tree label!

Answers – 1. Sea Carrot, 2. Oyster fungus, 3. !t’s the difference between Large Bindweed, where you can see it, and Hedge bindweed where you can’t. Gardeners hate both! 4. Marsh Woundwort. 5. Marsh thistle. 6. Hart’s tongue. 7. It’s yellow, still a strawberry but it’s inedible, 8 Sea radish. 9.Comma. 10. See nameplate.

Winter camping – here we come!

Pen y fan in February 2016

Did I mention that we love going to the Bannau Brycheiniog – the Brecon Beacons – or, according to the spellchecker here on my laptop, the “banana strychnine”. Every year as the clocks go back and it gets dark so painfully early, we try to squeeze in one last camper-van trip before we drain the water tank and pull the curtains. Summer is never long enough. It’s over now to fungi and ferns and we managed to fit in a walk around the woods on the Mendips last week which was disappointingly light on fungi but challenging on the fern front. I remember well the early days when I thought there were just Dandelions until I discovered that they were just a small part of a huge group. These discoveries always leave me equally exhilarated and depressed. On our walk, and with a good deal of hands and knees stuff, I confirmed what I already knew in my heart of hearts – that not all green and ferny looking things are called Bracken (any more than all overweight white middle class men in Rohan trousers are called Dave). At once, exhilarated and depressed, I lashed out on a couple (more) ferny books and settled down for a good read. I am abashed; vanquished; and breathlessly looking forward to a ferny bash in the Bannau.

So it’s been a bit of a week – two exhibitions; Paula Rego and Goya at the Holburne Museum and Rinko Kawauchi: “At the edge of the everyday world” at the Arnolfini in Bristol; an excellent talk by the Director of the Holburne at BRLSI and two films – “The Outrun” in Bath and “A sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” – both of them lovely; the second, showing at the Watershed was a biopic of Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham a shamefully neglected modernist artist. After the usual depressing few autumn weeks we felt like students again, bathing in fountains of glittering inspiration. Of course the payback came with exhaustion and an urgent call to the doctor when my heart rate went down to 45 and blood pressure to 92/61. I’d have to have been a saint not to laugh when the doctor told me that my symptoms were caused by the drugs I was prescribed to cure the symptoms! I don’t want to expire in a Kafkaesque cycle of thwarted goodwill.

Anyway, the sun’s shining and we’ve booked a spot alongside the Monmouth and Brecon canal. I’ve also been sorting through hundreds of old flower photos but I’m held up by the absence of replies to emails requesting bits of information. If this army of citizen scientists is ever going to live up to its immense promise, the learned institutions need to get over themselves and answer emails from those of us without PhD’s. But then I’m a bit of a loner and the least clubbable person you could imagine. Madame is the only person who comes (dangerously) close to “getting” me – we even hold hands in bed: dangerous!

Finally, I’ve yielded to temptation and bought a black iron bread tin. I’ve had enough of pancake sourdough loaves. Tigger and Eeyore the two starters are going well, and so I’ll re-unite them during the week and start some experiments to create an organic sourdough loaf that stands up enough to make a sandwich with a soft enough crust not to rip the roof of my mouth or snap teeth off. Then when that’s done I’m going to write a long letter to Keir Starmer to explain that his job is not to shuffle bits of spreadsheet around like a junior manager in a shoe shop, but to reunite managerial competence with a bit of visionary leadership and some ethical backbone which he seems to have lost somewhere along the way.