Category: Art

Ghostly presences

Ghost sign on a wall in Bladud’s Buildings, Bath

It would be nice to be able to believe that the story of Bladud – the mythical king who founded Bath after noticing his rather scabby pigs liked to roll in the black mud of the heated swamp that was once all that existed of the Georgian/Roman/1960’s redevelopment horror – was so fanciful that no-one, not even a PR consultant, would ever come up with such a fanciful story again. Such people still exist in droves as hack journalists and are only too happy to use Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 11th century yarn to attract visitors/shoppers to the City. Naturally they’re not coming for the black mud any more, and leprosy has dropped off the radar for the well-to-do; but they are coming to experience the rather confusing melange of Roman Bath and Jane Austin’s Bath alongside a bit of shopping and more chain restaurants than you could shake a stick at. We don’t mention slavery except perhaps to mention the brave attempts to abolish it. Kingsmead doesn’t feature much in the story because it was heavily bombed in error by enemy pilots during the war who were using an old version of Google Maps and missed the Abbey and the Admiralty offices by a quarter of a mile. Kingsmead has always had a bit of a reputation which it clings to even after the loss of the medieval brothels, stinking dye works and unruly drinking dens. We’ve had two stabbings, and a drugs arrest since we got back from Cornwall on Monday. Bladud, just to clarify things, was not a Georgian builder and had no hand in building the rather lovely terrace that bears his name. But hey! truth is whatever you want it to be and if you’d like to believe that the Bell Inn on Walcot Street was landlorded in the sixth century BCE by King Lear (Bladud’s Son) be my guest. You’ll be working for the Conservative government in no time.

Sorry, honestly, for that little eruption of bile, but living in the gulf between what we experience every day and how the media chooses to report it is depressing and debilitating in every way. However back to ghost signs, and the one in the photo was only uncovered in July of last year, and all credit to the owners who understood that historical relics like this are a marvellous reminder of the real life of the City in the past. Actually there are two signs, and the one underneath can be dated to around 1847. You can check it out on the Akeman Press website run by Andrew Swift, the author of some of the best historical guides to Bath. We ordered one of his books online and they delivered it by hand!

These ghostly remains are a powerful reminder that we don’t live exclusively in the present, whatever the therapists may tell us; we really can be in two places, or two centuries at once, and that experience can be profoundly important. Seeing and touching the insignificant artifacts of the past stretches the imagination and informs a kind of empathy with the challenging and different cultures of the past. I was once asked if I was a member of the “Somerset Poles”. I assumed that the question referred to the direct descendants of Margaret Pole, 15th Century Countess of Salisbury, and for all I know I could be. What I didn’t realize until last year, was that there are many more people with my surname living in places like South Stoke than I’d ever known about. There are family stories about my dad going to visit to old aunts “somewhere near Cheddar” who were part of my great grandmother’s family; so yes I probably am a Somerset Pole but I harbour no delusional thoughts about living in one of those grand Georgian houses. My first thought on seeing those ghostly signs was to imagine myself driving a small cart down the street, collecting urine for the dye works. I’m really not gentleman material.

The signs also remind me that I won’t be here forever. Andrew Swift suggests that an early owner of the building would have been the surgeon and apothecary William John Church. Where is he buried? who knows? There are no surviving grateful patients or litigious failures to ask and in any case he moved on when the eye infirmary set up shop. I can close my eyes and imagine well heeled patients entering and leaving through that very door. People began coming to Bath in Georgian times because they were often sick and believed that the sulphurous waters could make them well. Later, when it became fashionable, there’s no doubt that some of the visitors could have been found in the brothels of Kingsmead and up the London Road.

Bath has an incredible abundance of ghost signs and most visitors hurry past without looking up at them but for me they’re better than all the carefully curated signage. Dog food, engine oil, eye infirmaries, dairies, cafes; in fact all the everyday stuff tells us more about Bath than the glossiest shop window. When I was a child and we caught the bus into Bristol, I was always intrigued by a sign above a fairly grubbly looking shop front in Old Market. It announced “Ace Erections” by way of a curly neon tube in red. I always thought it was a building company!

The Wassail – here’s one I blessed earlier!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end of the wild is nigh!

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

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

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

Hope in a hopeless world

Winter Heliotrope, Petasites fragrans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COPOUT 28

The dog’s – well you know!

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

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

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

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

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

Singing it like it is

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Big Sky – a lovely local South Wales Band

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what happens when we try to live in one room!

My temporary workspace

We’ve been paying a great deal of attention to our electricity bills as the winter advances on us. The Government’s Panglossian approach towards other people’s hardships has meant that we’ve turned the central heating off in all but one of the rooms in our flat because not withstanding the unstinting generosity of the press releases, our bills have always been higher that the so called averages quoted by them. Sadly we’ve been twinned with a steelworks for the purposes of averaging out the bill. The fight against black mould is continuing in spite of repeated appeals to our landlord – the Church of England Pensions Board if you’re interested – whose rent increase this year pretty much swallowed up their pension increase. “Well, we all have to do our bit” we say through gritted teeth.

So what to do? The allotment is one way of getting warm. Clearing the beds of last year’s crops and weeds is excellent exercise that apparently rivals wearing lycra for fending off heart attacks. There are just a couple of beds left to clear but this week we turned to the polytunnel because that will be the first area to be planted up. First we clear all the plants, and in normal years that would be the end of it but this year the encroachment of bindweed means that it needs digging. In a perfect world we’d be committed no-diggers, but the Potwell Inn has to make do with living in the real world in which bindweed – if it’s not controlled – will choke out almost any plant, however vigorous. The thick, 2mm diameter rhizomes, can spread amazingly quickly and even the smallest broken bits, left in the ground, can regenerate. Our second – only slightly lesser problem is couch grass which invades every year from the neglected plots next to ours. Then there’s the green mould that gradually builds up on the greenhouse and the polytunnel. We scrub it off with an organic product called Citrox which has an immediate beneficial effect on the light transmission. Yes, most days – if it’s not raining too hard – we spend a few hours up at the allotment keeping warm and fit. Then most days we come home and fall asleep for half an hour. For some obscure reason I’ve always loved digging, so even if it’s only a few selected beds it’s a joy only slightly tempered by protesting joints and muscles.

But the mess on the dining table tells another story. Back in the day when I was writing radio scripts, it would take roughly an hour to write a minute’s worth of broadcastable material. Sermons took the same amount of time when I wrote them out in full; but over time I learned to work firstly with notes and then eventually I could ad lib after a good deal of study and practice. Always, though, a very slow process. The dining table library is all about identifying the things we’ve found whilst out walking. The fungus season has reached its peak a little late this year due to the weather, but being relatively new to fungi it seems to take an eternity to identify them fully. Why it should be that there’s so much intellectual satisfaction from identifying the LBJ’s (little brown jobs) is a task for a psychologist probably; but I love the challenge, and going out with friends looking for fungi is even more fun.

Then of course there’s writing this blog and cooking meals for ourselves and occasional family members and shopping, oh and meetings, drinking coffee, eating too many biscuits and watching the telly (except for news programmes which upset me). On the best days Madame and I share the table and I write while she draws at the other end. As you see in the photograph, I may have encroached on her territory.

I suppose when spring comes and the weather warms up we’ll move back into our respective workspaces but for now – although you might imagine we’ve had a row as we work in silence – the arrangement suits us both. The only loser is the electricity company – well tough!

The taste of magic in the Bannau Brycheiniog

Pen y Fan hiding in clouds from the Monmouth and Brecon canal on an icy February morning in 2017

Just out of interest, Bannau Brycheiniog translates as Brychan’s Kingdom; Brychan being the fifth century king of this mountainous area. I’ve written frequently about this place because I love it to the core of my being. It’s a National Park but by no means a huge one; near to the Eastern border with England, more or less defined by the River Severn; a contested border which includes the Welsh Marches and Offa’s Dyke. A wayward and wandering line that’s been fought over for centuries as armies marched back and forth from Roman times onwards in search of gold and latterly for slate and coal, but whatever the quarry, the spoils were taken out of Wales and only the spoil heaps were left. The reversion to Welsh place names is one more skirmish between the Welsh and the colonisers; less spectacular than the burning of holiday cottages but no less fiercely fought for.

But we’re not here to pursue old rivalries. We’re here at the foot of the Bannau to rest and recuperate from hard work on the allotment and to adjust to a change in medication that’s left me feeling as if I’m recovering from the Flu. We have close friends who now live about 1000 feet up in the hills above Llangorse lake and we’ve been coming to this area for more than 30 years and watched as they worked a smallholding while working full time, and improving the cottage from an abandoned bothy to a family home.

So yesterday we lazed in the sun and then in the evening we went with our friends over to to the Three Horseshoes in Groesffordd for a meal and a couple of pints of a local light beer. Needless to say we had a brilliant evening because our interests overlap almost completely and predictably we talked about growing food, keeping animals, the relative merits of lamb (3/10) hogget (7/10) and mutton (10/10). We talked about beer and vegetables and favourite recipes and families and we all reassured ourselves that we hadn’t changed a bit in decades and laughed as if we would all live forever. We took one of the outdoor sheds with a spectacular view between the roofs of the village, across the valley to Pen y fan. The food was excellent and almost too unusual for pub food, we left with a couple of good recipe ideas and feeling that the expense of eating out was justified. The Three Horseshoes, predictably next door to a long closed smithy makes a good living in the most inaccessible spot, hidden deep in the middle of the village where it’s almost impossible to park. We chatted to the owner and he said it was because of their good reputation – and he was right. A delightful and affable landlord who thinks enough of his chefs to name them on the website.

We arrived home (at the campervan) as it was getting dark and sat outside watching the stars come out and listening to the evening sounds. To our great joy there was a wheezy snuffling and a couple of hedgehogs appeared, paused to take a look at us and shuffled off into the hedge again. We haven’t seen hedgehogs for something like 10 years. Way across there were tawny owls and all the usual roosting birds. It felt as if the thin thread holding us down to time and place, had broken and we were wandering in a more ancient time which came with all its literary associations.

Firstly, of course, Buckland Hill which is just down the road will be known to any lover of Tolkien who stayed here at Buckland whilst he was writing Lord of the Rings. We’ve walked miles of Offa’s Dyke, and I’ve loved Geoffrey Hill’s “Mercian Hymns “ set in the time of King Offa and which gets less difficult as I get older and feel the music rather than concentrate on the words. Madame has just finished reading A J Cronin’s “The Citadel” which is partly set just across the hills in the mining valleys. And then on an impulse I dug Bruce Chatwin’s book “On the Black Hill” out of the Kindle Library this morning. This has been one of my must-reads for decades, and I’ve actually got two paperback copies at home. Each of the three I’ve bought while we were up here and never got past about chapter three for the oddest reason. There’s a real “Vision Farm” below Offa’s Dyke facing Capel y Ffin and we once had a long and hard walk up Hatterall Hill, along the dyke and down past The Vision (you’ll need to take a map and a GPS to find the track down) and after crossing the Honddu river, back up past the ruins of the church built by Joseph Lyne, Father Ignatius, back along the opposite ridge and then dropping down the steep path turning left at a hawthorn tree, to Llanthony Abbey.

But I mentioned the fact that I’d always abandoned “On the Black Hill” after a couple of chapters, for an odd reason. It’s simply that the writing is so rich I never want to move on with the narrative, and so each page is an object of meditation. I finish the first couple of chapters and it’s if I’ve eaten a huge banquet and don’t want or need to eat for a week. Obviously this is a bit disruptive to the narrative flow. Cheap fiction does the exact opposite, using a narrative torrent to hurry you across the ludicrous improbabilities of the characterisation. Give me Bruce Chatwin any day, but I’d love to have the stamina to finish it.

One of my parishioners had a Welsh farmer as a distant relative, and she told me that this irascible man had married in a local church, started to drive his bride to the new marital home in the pony and trap . Somehow, on the way they’d had a fierce quarrel and she had got down from the trap and walked back to where she came from, leaving the bridegroom for good. A very Chatwin-esque yarn. I wonder if he’d heard that story independently?

Christmas Steps

It’s been an interesting few days because we’ve been over to Bristol – our city of birth- three times, and each time we’ve been able to revisit familiar places. This one is particularly important to me because when Christmas Steps was virtually rebuilt many decades ago, my Grandfather, who was over 70 at the time, came out of retirement to work on the medieval timbers because he was one of very few carpenters who actually knew how these timber framed buildings worked. So I always feel a particular affinity with this important remnant of the City, most of whose medieval buildings were destroyed by bombing during the 2nd world war; and those that weren’t were mostly demolished by planners, just as they were in Bath.

But these few buildings are surrounded and dwarfed by all the usual canyons of undistinguished glass and steel towers. Bristol, a creative boom city, is from a pedestrian’s street level point of view, noisy and rather shabby. There are many empty shops in what were once important shopping centres. Plato thought that cities were a work of art but he’d have held his tongue if he’d been here. Here’s a photo of the now derelict original Bristol Royal Infirmary – the revamped modern hospital is just across the road but why on earth they don’t do something about this ghastly mess is a mystery.

The lettering over the door includes the words “Charity Universal” – Hmmm!

But we couldn’t resist revisiting the Museum and Art Gallery where we found one of the pieces of pottery that most inspired my interest in Chinese ceramics. This Chün dynasty bowl is inspirational in its restraint – an object of meditation,

Later we had lunch at Watershed and were greatly amused to see that so many apparent pitching meetings were going on in the cafe. We felt a bit odd; actually talking to one another with no anticipation of a future commission whilst sharing a bottle of wine and keeping our mobiles in our pockets without a single laptop between us. Most of our fellow diners wore furrowed brows for fear of being suspected of slacking, drank water and spoke of going forward, hiding behind their de rigeur screens. Later again as we walked to the bus station and passed the foot of Christmas Steps again, Madame pointed out the rather elaborate birthday cake she would like me to bake for her. Very well Madam!

Slow Down!

Wyre Forest National Nature Reserve, 3rd November 2019
The ubiquity of the unnoticed

In an idle moment this morning I did a search of my photos using the search term “fern” – really just to see how much Artificial Intelligence the Google Pictures search engine uses. I was expecting to see all the ferns I’d identified, of course, although the indexing of my pictures sometimes takes quite a while; but what I didn’t expect was page after page of thumbnails of the ones I’d photographed intentionally but never identified – or photographs where ferns just happened to be in the frame. Nowadays, of course, I am consciously interested but two possible explanations come to mind. Firstly (and I know this is true) I’ve always loved ferns for their architecture but was never brave enough to even try to identify them. The second thought is that they’re ubiquitous, absolutely everywhere. If you’re in almost any landscape from mountain to mineshaft, you’re likely to find ferns, but of course you often don’t see them because they all look more or less like bracken, they’re not interesting to birds and insects and they don’t have colourful flowers.

However this isn’t going to be either a dissertation or an evangelistic tract on ferns. What I want to think about in this post is the underrated spiritual practice of attentiveness. When our first two children were toddlers we lived in Hotwells in Bristol, at the bottom of Hope Chapel Hill. We had no car, and bicycles were no use at the bottom of one of the steepest hills in the city, and so we walked up to Clifton to do most of our shopping. The walk would often take twice as long as it needed because the boys were absolutely fascinated by the flotsam that collected in the deep cracks between the cobbled gutters. Theirs was a wonderful non-discriminatory curiosity and included the whole compass of litter from dog-ends to bottle tops, twigs, stones, feathers, ring-pulls from cans, broken bits of plastic, mirrors, bits of string and soggy ink-run love letters and final demands. I always admired them for the joy they were able to derive from simple ordinary things and let them get on with it. My intervention moment came somewhere between dogs turds and dead pigeons and we always had a packet of wet wipes somewhere about us, just in case.

The point of that excursus on why our children should probably have been taken into care is that the process of instilling discipline, obedience and so-called grown up distinctions between right and wrong; clean and dirty; appropriate and inappropriate, interesting and unimportant, are the prison chains of our culture. We all know about the blowhard critic of so-called modern art, shaking their purple wattles and declaring that “any child could have done that!” and it makes me want to weep for the loss of my own innocent eye; the paralysis I used to experience in the face of a sheet of empty paper; the toleration of my subconscious prison warder who said no to every intuition. For years, in my late teens and early twenties I could only write with a cheap fountain pen on sheets of kitchen paper, torn into approximate A4 sheets. The paper sucked the ink off the pen and trapped the thought before it could be crushed by the censor.

Attentiveness isn’t – to my mind – the exact equivalent to mindfulness because although it focuses equally on the moment, it goes further than merely noting the present without judgement but includes a strongly purposive engagement with it. Imagine taking a walk in the woods and purposefully engaging with nature; glimpsing the sky through the trees and reading the clouds for rain; keeping a sharp eye on the plants you pass and looking for anything that’s the least bit unexpected or out of the ordinary – a patch of lighter green; a grass that’s taller than its companions and looks just a bit different; a fern gr,owing like a shuttlecock instead of randomly like bracken; a purple flower that looks like an orchid – but which orchid? a dandelion that turns out on closer inspection not to be a dandelion at all, but something different; the seed head of what turns out to be a Goatsbeard that blows your mind with its intricacy and mathematical exactitude; the little weed with no petals that lives in a gateway and smells like a pineapple when you squeeze it; the bright sulphur yellow butterfly in the early spring; the sound of an owl – but which owl? – at dusk; the heart stopping moment on the riverbank when a hare leaps a fence at great speed within feet of you; the bright red mushroom, flaked with white scales that looks like the ones that fairies sit on in children’s books.

In essence, attentiveness forces you to slow right down because you’re drinking in the sights and smells and sounds. There’s no element of inner struggle to calm the mind because it’s working at full stretch – just not on the stuff that keeps you awake at night. And of course the imagination is working in conjunction with the five senses – looks like; sounds like; smells like; feels like; although I’d give tastes like a miss in the absence of a skilled guide. Attentiveness can become an intellectual challenge too; demanding further study in order to unravel the mysteries.

But the practice of attentiveness also awakens a profound awareness of the sheer beauty of the natural world; so beautiful in fact that it sometimes seems gratuitous sometimes erotic in its sensuousness – and that’s occasionally reflected in the local names for plants. English names, for example of Cuckoo Pint- Arum maculatum are unashamedly vulgar. The ‘pint’ for instance refers not to the standard glass of beer, but to “pintle” – the socket into which the rudder on a boat fits and a Scottish slang word for a penis. Put the two together and you get the reference to cuckoo in the nest and also the allusion to the pintle being – well, in someone else’s nest. Two other local names for the same plant are Preacher in the Pulpit and Lords and Ladies; I hope you won’t need me to explain!

Often when we’re walking slowly we get startled by runners busily breaking records; dog walkers chatting in groups who could walk past a small war and not notice and even botanists who – GPS in hand – rush to the next rarity, missing the beauty of the everyday and the ordinary. But the ordinary almost always turns out to be extraordinary when you take a closer look – especially if you’ve got a magnifying glass. Ubiquity doesn’t or shouldn’t imply not worth bothering with.

A couple of ideas worth holding on to, or better perhaps stealing back from religious orthodoxy are wonder and glory. I think we shy away from them because of their associations or perhaps they make us afraid our friends will think we are a bit mad. Slowing down and practicing attentiveness in nature will almost inevitably lead to that surging joy (which could still be surges of natural endorphins – but so what)? There’s nothing like a good surge of joy for lifting you out of despondency!

And as for the confusing plants …. vive la difference! Below, some finds for today. I recognised the Sea Plantain and the Rock Sea Spurry, living dangerously on a busy path, but as for the interesting brown lump exposed on the rocks at very low tide – who knows? ……. but it was completely fascinating.

An evening benediction after the storm

We were in the middle of making up the bed in the campervan when the whole interior was suddenly suffused with golden light after a stubbornly grey day. After ten more minutes of sunset it was dark; the wind finally gave way and the leaky windows stopped singing.

It’s not just us. We stand at the edge of the campsite and see doors and tents opening everywhere as shadowy dusk-darkened campers take photographs they may never look at again. The feeble flash of the phone cameras is an ironic commentary on our hubristic relationship with nature. It’s a scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” enacted every time the sky clears as night falls. We wonder whether the Green Ray will momentarily flash across the sea but it never does and it doesn’t matter, because if it did, every sunset afterwards would feel like a disappointment. So we stand there like penitents at the edge of the land, waiting for a blessing ; a sign that all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

“Isn’t that just so beautiful” we murmur without quite understanding how the earth seems to stand still at these moments which, strictly speaking, are the moments of extreme dynamism when day gives way to night and we, in our exact place and time, experience the loss of the sun with nothing more than faith and hope to keep us safe through the night. Of course we rarely reflect on this but turn to go back indoors and open another bottle, but perhaps a holiday – there’s a clue in the name – is the time when time is made for wonder.

When we are at the far western edge; in Cornwall,in Pembrokeshire and on the Lleyn peninsula, we see the sun setting over the sea. The last word of each day, you might say, is emptiness and silence with no human structure or invention intruding. The setting sun is silent but strangely the Moon always seems to me to have an ethereal sound trailing behind her. The sunsets here unite the elements of earth, air, fire and water which, in the West, are the constituents of life itself. The Taoists add wood and metal and take away air but that seems to me to spring from another, equally valid conception of our place in the world in which we are makers. What defines us as human is not so much thinking as detached observers of what the Taoists call the Ten Thousand Things; but our capacity as makers. Wood; Fire: Earth; Metal and Water – the elements that lie at the heart of the forge, the pottery, the farm and the building.

Air, though, as the medium of sound, has to fall still for there to be silence. St Davids Cathedral, in the absence of the crowds, is one of the most silent places I know save for the Jackdaws whose chatter almost enhances the absence of sound. Early in the morning and late in the evening the Cathedral sits in a protected valley – out of sight of seaborn raiders – so deep that uniquely, from my limited experience, the passer-by looks down on the roof and tower; so the sounds of ice cream queues, the pasty and souvenir shops and the constant flow of buses, coaches and minibuses barely intrude. The silence seeps into your bones and it’s good. The silence searches your inmost being and occasionally – if you wait long enough and quietly enough – will even speak; say something important. You needn’t even go into the building, in fact it may me more of a distraction to go through the great wooden door and be dazzled by the work of human hands. Any old seat outside in the sun or the wind and rain will do but it’s fine to wait for a sunny day because that makes it easier to wait.

And if you find, like me, that hordes of people are a bit off putting, try St Non’s Well about a mile’s walk away and the traditional birthplace of St David, but perhaps more importantly a place to take off your walking boots and bathe your tired feet in the cool water. The well itself is almost invisible to coastal path walkers with their eyes and hearts set on a personal best target, so you can sit there in silence for ages without being disturbed. Those that do see you usually hurry away in case you’re a threat to civilized human life!

That St David’s is a holy place is without doubt; but I doubt whether any religion has more than squatters’ rights to its benedictions.