Category: Eudaimonia – flourishing

Our cunning plan to escape the storms falls at the first hurdle

It was, after all, slightly counterintuitive – to escape a yellow weather warning yesterday by driving towards the problem – but we figured that if we drove down to Cornwall early enough we’d arrive before the approaching warm front hit the coast and turned the cold air that’s been squatting like a toad over us for days, into snow and hail; giving us time to unload the car before the heavy stuff began. I was so excited about my plan that I woke up at 4.00am and couldn’t get back to sleep; so I got up at 4.30am and made tea. There was nothing we could do about the 7.00am grocery delivery except pack everything up and get the car ready to leave. It was -3C when we left and the temperature rose slowly as we headed towards Cornwall in the gathering dawn light.

And it should have worked if it weren’t for the caretaker at the cottage we were going to. The rules – she pointed out – were not to arrive before 4.00pm and we were far too early having almost beaten the storm’s landfall. It rained fairly hard for the last couple of miles and we had hoped for a less belligerent welcome. The temperature had collapsed again and Madame suggested (in the absence of anything resembling a warm fire) that we go for a walk.

Now we both love the Roseland peninsula – we’ve been coming here for decades – but yesterday didn’t feel like one of those old Great Western Railway posters; the blue skies, the seagulls and sandcastles on the beach. The sky was slate grey and mantled a freezing gale which carried sharpened slivers of ice that sliced away at our faces. Unbelievably there was a party of litter pickers working across the beach – I wondered if they were the Portscatho Bloods doing a bit of community payback. “What fun” said Madame as the rain ran down her trousers and into her boots – but I didn’t think she was being completely honest when I looked at the photo. The sea was – as they say around here just before the boat capsizes – “a bit lumpy!” and with a couple of hours to while away, I wandered off plant hunting and found the only thing on the beach with a smile on its face. In fact I couldn’t quite believe how healthy the Buckshorn Plantain looked, clinging to its crack in the shallow cliff. I had been hoping to find a Sea Spleenwort – I know they used to be here but after several years of hunting I’ve never found one, and nor has anyone else for the last 23 years according to the wonderful BSBI database, so I’m not going to beat myself up too much. By the time we got back I was so cold I couldn’t open the cottage door; we were both soaked to the skin and – if I’m completely honest – I was a tiny bit grumpy; warming my corpse fingers in a pair of heated gloves. When we finally got the kit inside we turned on so many heaters they probably had to start up a power station somewhere and ate ultra processed pizza (breaking several rules at once!). We don’t travel light when the Potwell Inn goes off on an expedition. Cameras, binoculars, books and computers; power units and leads and spare batteries, walking sticks and just the one tripod this time; oh and drawing equipment in case we run out of things to do.

We were in bed by 9.00pm and then this morning, Madame was reading aloud extracted best moments from the internet when she came across some excellent naughty bits which included a video interview with David Hockney where he was talking enthusiastically about spring – his favourite season. “It’s like an erection” he said. “Everything is upright, and primed to go – but it doesn’t last very long”. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Outside in the lane we could see the beginnings of the spring erections. Alexanders, Cow parsley and even Hogweed were already shouldering one another aside in the great competition for growing space. Pennywort has sprinted away from the blocks, and the Sea-radishes have reached their moment of ravishing beauty before it all goes wrong and they leave their rosettes aside to go for broke in the dune margins. There were even a couple of impoverished looking Red Campions in flower, like ragged beggars waiting for a hot meal.

So today it’s still raining and we’re resting. Madame is reading and as soon as this is finished I’ll go back to the soul-destroying boredom of converting my database dates from English to American format so that the software can list accurately by date. I’m sure there’s a way of automating the process but it would probably take longer to learn how to do it than to amend each (of 350) dates manually. I’ve almost finished sorting the wheat from the chaff in Google Photos so that just leaves all the photos I took in 2022, 23 and 24 to be identified and catalogued. This path is not lined with primroses!

Looking across Gerrans Bay in May 2023 on a sunnier day. This time we’re on the far side of the bay on the right hand edge of the photo. Invisible, sadly, because of the sea mist!

u4 hardly begins to express the richness of a remembered childhood.

u4, by the way, is the way that science now describes these photographs of a not very lovely patch of grassland on a wet July day in 2020, but before I get to that I want to talk about what a dialect usually means.

I was born in Gloucestershire and we’ve lived within twenty miles of Staple Hill for most of our lives – during which time the area has gone under three different county designations; whilst large industries, for instance shoe making and coal mining have disappeared leaving hardly a trace. Perhaps, for me, the saddest thing of all is that the local dialect has almost died as well. You could always tell where someone came from after you’d heard a couple of sentences. Bristol was particularly rich in local dialects so you could almost predict which parish people came from. All that “alright my lover” and “gert lush” nonsense that we hear when outsiders try to imitate Bristolian is fit only for second rate comedy programmes because if – fifty years ago – you’d walked up Two Mile Hill from the centre you’d have travelled through at least four distinct speech forms. The slum clearances and tower blocks mixed things up in the fifties and sixties but even as a child you could leave the hints of Somerset behind as you entered St Jude’s and Old Market and then uphill through Easton (incomprehensible to outsiders) , Barton Hill, St George, Speedwell and unmistakable Kingswood; beyond which Gloucestershire partially reasserted itself, and somewhere in altogether alien territory, there was Wiltshire. When I started going out with Madame, if I missed the last bus (which I did regularly), I would walk from the western boundary to beyond the eastern boundary of the City and stick my head around the bedroom door to say “alright?” to my Mum when I got home. My own voice was shaped by the rounder and softer vowels of the southern part of Gloucestershire and I’ve never tried or even wanted to disguise it. It’s the dialect of my childhood and it’s a thing of structured beauty, of arcades and landscapes and industries; of Methodism and mining and shoe making. I’ve always thought that to lose my accent would be to lose part of my essential being and if anyone has ever equated my accent with any kind of swede bashing stupidity I walk on by and leave them to their knuckle dragging idiocy. If I’m anything at all it’s one of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals whose roots lie in life and experience and whose reading and understanding is refracted through lived experience.

I suppose there is some kind of generic west country accent that will get you by in most places , but with the exception of one place I almost never hear the real thing. When I first visited the sawmill at Oldland Common – exactly halfway between where I was born and where we live now, I was served by a man who spoke the precise dialect of my childhood. I can’t begin to express how unsettlingly moving that was; like finding and losing something very precious that had no monetary value at all but meant the world to me; as if I were listening to a recording of my life starting in the distant past.

Rodway Hill was always a part of my childhood. We had picnics there and eventually I went to school there. On Rodway hill I had the first of many experiences of the oceanic as I laid in the grass watching the clouds and listening to the wind in the (as yet unnamed long grass). The flora were integrating themselves into my mind; becoming part of me. The hill itself is quite small but remains inexplicably protected from all the surrounding development. you can stand at the edge and look across to the dense post-war housing where I was brought up. When I was at school there I went out with a girl who (pre Beeching of course) caught the train back to Yate where she lived and I would walk down to the station with her and look at the sandstone cutting without much curiosity. But that landscape has structured my imagination and so every time I find myself in one of those strange and starved landscapes I feel as “at home” as I do in the sawmill ordering fence posts.

In July 2020 during lockdown I had the strongest urge to go back there and so Madame and I drove over in the rain and I took a series of photographs of the plants that caught my eye. That was the end of it until I made the madcap decision to catalogue all my random photos, name the plants and build a big database. Then last week I got to the Rodway photos and – because I know a bit more botany these days – I saw straight away that these plants were very different to a selection taken from, say, two miles down the road. It was as if the hill spoke in a kind of intangible dialect.

This discovery was provoked by the fact that there was a plant I couldn’t get my head around. All the phone apps told me with absolute certainty that it was Heath Bedstraw – Galium saxatile – Then, after a good deal of research I made the surprising discovery that Rodway hill is a small patch of what the scientists call acid heath, sitting on the cap of precisely the sandstone I’d seen but not understood, waiting for the train with my then girlfriend. Then after even more searching I discovered that my photographID’s were likely correct except for the fact that some of the flowers had five petals and not four, and some of the groups of leaves came in fours but not fives or sixes. After exchanging emails with our County Recorder I discovered that (yet again) plants don’t read textbooks and that my plants were within normal variation.

But there’s a kicker to this rather long-winded piece because it helped unravel the mystery of why I’m attracted to these particular landscapes. Why else would I feel so at home up on Mendip or down in Cornwall, on Dartmoor or on the Bannau if it weren’t for the fact that they speak with exactly the same botanical dialect that I learned on Rodway as a child. The top of Blackdown above Burrington is almost identical – with its sandstone cap above the carboniferous limestone. The reference to u4 in the title of this piece is merely the code for this specific habitat in the National Vegetation Classification (NVC) descriptors with all of the poetry, all of the memories, the longings and all the rest of the synaptic riches stripped out.

Maybe we would be able to grasp the meanings of landscapes and their flora by approaching them as dialects. The way things grow around here. Maybe we should occasionally take a break from Gradgrindian dogmatism of precise description and let u4 back into the sunshine like a pit pony released from darkness and sweated labour into meadows and heaths where lovely things grow in historic and vibrant cultural communities.

A very happy new year to you from the Potwell Inn

Modern peasant – part 2.

This photo was taken on the allotment back in 2018

Modern peasant – such a slick title, and I was really pleased with myself for dreaming it up and writing about it a couple of days ago. On the other hand I was a bit cautious about using it in case I was stealing the wind from someone else’s sails – so I Googled it and got back a string of academic references and a book title: “The Modern Peasant, Adventures in City Food” published in 2013 and written by Jojo Tulloh. I’m giving its full title for reasons which (I hope) will become clear and so you can get yourself a copy too.

As it happened neither author nor title meant anything to me but I was intrigued enough to order secondhand copies of two of her books which hadn’t arrived by the time I wrote my piece, and I wrote on, unaware of the resonances between her work and mine. When it arrived I started to read it and I’m now halfway through. It’s almost alarming to see the parallels and tremendously reassuring to think that a generation and 25+ years behind, our vision continues. I always look at the bibliography in every book I come across which has one, and anyone who can freely quote from Patience Gray, Jane and Geoffrey Grigson, John Berger, William Cobbett, Dorothy Hartley .. and so it goes on – someone whose roots are so deeply set within the same humus that inspires the Potwell Inn – I know I’m going to love.

There are books I’ve read which express something that so profoundly resonates with me I know I’ll read and re-read them. Patience Gray, for instance, is one such writer whose recipes express something much deeper; a philosophy of life. Bernard Leach’s book “A Potters’ Book” does the same thing. Hidden within the instructions and formulae is a whole way of being human that can move us on to a different track. I first read the Leach book in one session one summer day, leaning against the library shelf where I’d found it. I didn’t understand the half of it and even now, each time I re-read it I find something new that I never previously understood. That summer afternoon I knew I wanted to become a potter.

So this rather lovely book could be the manifesto for the way of being human that Madame and I dreamed of living out, getting on for 60 years ago. Bread making, fermenting, growing, rearing, foraging, pickling and preserving are the chapter headings beneath which lies a rich mother lode of personal memories. I spent this morning rescuing a batch of Tayberry jelly that refused to set. Tayberries lack pectin and it can make very sloppy jelly; good for rice puddings but not so good on a slice of bread and butter. My discovery today was that by increasing the boiling point to 105.5C – just one degree higher – the jelly (rather less of it) set perfectly.

It’s early winter and our storage cupboards are pretty full. Some crops went well and some not so well. Our weekend in the Brecon Beacons gave us the chance to share ideas, swap recipes and cook together with our oldest friends which is always an inspiring time and makes my creative juices flow. We tasted cheeses and helped to send pigs off for slaughter. Madame and I have brewed beer, grown crops, kept a goat, made terrible wine and maintained a flock of increasingly heterodox hens. Every page of “Modern Peasant” contained a reminder of our journeys in France, Portugal and Spain in search of food we’d read about but never actually eaten. The tripe sausages in a motorway service station near Lyon that tasted of shit were probably the worst thing we ever tried. In Portugal I had to almost fight a waiter to try Feijoada in the one restaurant that still produced it in its original peasant glory. The waiters were so amazed that they surrounded me and watched as I ate, and I swear I found a pig’s tooth nestling in it. In another restaurant a waiter refused point blank to sell me Stone Soup because, he said, I wouldn’t like it. I insisted and I didn’t – but at least I can speak from experience.

Ah yes, we watched handmade cheese being made in Wensleydale and we’ve now eaten our way through many of the artisanal products which have come back from virtual extinction. The Gloucester Services on the M5 have become a place of pilgrimage for foodies; unimaginable 50 years ago! The Potwell Inn kitchen has been assembled from all the recipes we’ve ever tried and loved. There are always two or three types of stock on the go, and the longer we go on the more likely it is that we will have the exact right tool for the job. Two or three times a week you’d see sourdough proving on the stove in a bowl that was given to us 67 years ago.

So yes I was excited, encouraged and inspired by Jojo Tulloh’s book, and if you live in a small flat in the middle of a city and long to discover your inner peasant, this lovely book will set you on the path for sure.

The Potwell Inn and the modern peasant

I’ll get to the dog later, meanwhile the fruits of a morning in the kitchen; some bread proving on the stove , some Tayberry Jam, some Dutch apple cake and a delightful but very hungry Bordeaux Mastiff.

Being a modern peasant

Like all the best thoughts, this one popped into my mind after a couple of days on the stove. Beaten back into the kitchen by 90 mph winds and repeated floods, we’ve moved into one of my favourite times of the year – the pre-Christmas cookathon. In the last couple of weeks I’ve made the Christmas puds, the Christmas cake and a Dundee cake plus a lot of experimental bread baking of which more later. There’s method in the madness because it involves emptying the freezer as much as possible to make room for the Christmas onslaught, as well as emptying the cupboards of all the dried fruit that’s been lurking in the larder since last year. I appreciate that the real focus should be on buying the new seasonal dried fruit that’s just coming on to the market but I’ve never been that organised. I’ve often mentioned here that I get the feeling I’m channeling my Mum when I cook the Christmas food. It was she who taught my sister and me to bake bread and make the cakes and puddings. She taught me to make Yorkshire puddings with an unforgettable demonstration of the specific gloppy sound of a batter at just the right thickness. I admit that I dropped the added bicarb in greens as soon as I could, but the basics were all there.

This mindfulness of the past is an essential peasant quality. Peasant consciousness is filled with connections – with seasonality; with location; with nature; and all of them forged into instinctive knowledge. My Mum could judge the approaching weather by looking into the sky and seeing what was going on over Granny Perrin’s Nest which I could never see! She’d never used anything other than an outside earth closet until she’d lived her first decade in the Chilterns. She knew the flowers by their local folk names which makes it difficult to know what she was actually describing when she talked about her favourite flower – Ladies Slipper – which is used for seven flowers in Somerset alone.

I hate the way we use the word “peasant” to denigrate people whose knowledge is so profoundly integrated and I much prefer the French paysan which embodies the sense of rootedness and place; of flora and fauna and of the knowledge of how to grow things well and how to heal them; how to cook and eat and how to move in a landscape without damaging it. Peasant speech is full of earthy, hard won wisdom – not from the latest scientific paper but from generations of experience. My Grandfather Tommy Cox whose family had lived in Stoke Row since the eighteenth century; so long that the village had both Cox’s Cottages and Cox’s Lane within its boundaries, would say of cow manure – “There’s more heart in a sheep’s fart!”. He was a self-taught carpenter who gave me my first slide rule; taught me how to use logarithms and helped me build my first radio sets. He was as far from stupid as you could get; the prototype of all modern peasants.

Peasant knowledge lives in the hands and fingers, in the senses of touch and vision, taste and smell; in the ability to mend and repair; to ride the waves when the going gets tough, in the collaborative community of mutual aid and barter. All this came back to me as I was writing my talk on AI and plant phone apps. Yes we can use the correct name – in Latin too – but do we even begin to see what my Mum saw? do we know if Ladies Slipper was an almost extinct orchid, or perhaps a more common Kidney Vetch whose specific name “vulneraria” suggests healing properties. Was she laughing because she knew the name, on that walk back from the Crown at Parkfield when the old man passing us described the Dandelions my sister had picked as “piss the beds”. She was the most larcenous mother in history. Any walk around a garden would see her dropping snaffled plant material into her pre-prepared handbag. My sister is still growing one of Mum’s liberated Speedwell plants on the steps outside her flat. Both of us inherited her love of gardening and both of us have had city allotments. We two seem to have inherited that peasant blood; of growing and eating our own produce and in my passion for hand crafts.

Meanwhile it’s been radio silence on the Potwell Inn blog, largely because it’s been a pretty chaotic time, with hospital and GP appointments (we are now both officially alive!); failed hot water boiler; four named storms; dentist appointments – we like to squeeze them all in while we’re not off camping; family birthdays; physiotherapy appointments; winter repairs to the camper van, a field trip to the Mendip Hills; writing a talk on artificial intelligence and wildlife phone apps which I gave last Tuesday to the Bath Natural History Society; and a four day trip to our friends in the Bannau Brycheiniog aka the Brecon Beacons – which is where the dog comes in. Last weekend we drove up to the Bannau to our friends’ smallholding. As ever it was a full four days which included loading a couple of pigs to take to the local slaughterhouse, and trips to Brecon and Talgarth where we watched a dozen or more Red Kites milling around in search of scraps from the local butcher who feeds them. Red Kite were a rarity a few years ago and now they’re fanning out across the country. They don’t kill their prey but are mainly carrion eaters – tidying up and reaping where others have sown. Recently we saw approaching fifty milling around a rubbish tip north of Rhayader and it can only be a matter of time before we fickle humans start to regard them as a bit of a nuisance and accuse them of stealing babies from their prams.

Much of the weekend was occupied by fun cooking, and we worked together to produce a lavish Sunday lunch from their own produce. Star of the show was a largish lamb joint which was placed on the side while we ate. Almost unnoticed the dog’s enormous head appeared silently above the counter and he took the whole joint in his jaws – slinking silently off followed by the irate owner and our friends who had nurtured the sheep. As Sam Weller might have said whilst describing a human kerfuffle in Pickwick Papers- “collapse of stout party!”

A revelation in the breadmaking department

I’ve had a breakthrough on the hunt for the perfect sourdough loaf. I’ve always gone with the prevailing wisdom (i.e. fashion) which insists that loaves should be bursting through their crusts with what’s known in the trade as spring, and with crusts as hard as hell that lacerate your mouth, and crumb that’s full of holes through which butter runs and greases your armpits. If it’s also got a pH around 2 and keeps you up all night with acid re-flux that just proves how hard you are. Of course some of these aims are mutually contradictory, for instance it’s virtually impossible to get anything other than a brick out of 100% wholemeal grains, and your four year old sack of flour bought during lockdown wouldn’t rise even with the addition of plastic explosive. As ever, ruthless orthodoxy is a blind alley with a big argumentative crowd of evangelical artisan bakers at the end.

What we’ve always wanted was rich sourdough flavour from a tin loaf with a regular cross section for slicing and toasting and a flavoursome crust with good colour which is soft enough to eat but adds to the whole taste – like the breakdown on good cheese; the bit between the rind and the main body which, by the way, I love. In search of this goal I just bought three black iron bread tins which are just fantastic – heavy and needing regular care but never washed. I bought a similar French crêpe pan twenty years ago which never ever sticks. But the real change was of mindset. I’ve always been the kind of cook who would slavishly follow the recipe or instructions in search of so-called perfection. But over recent years, and as my experience deepens, I’ve become more thoughtful; more creative and more willing to branch out. The arbiters of sourdough orthodoxy have always tended towards a ruthless rejection of yeast. Purity is everything – even though sourdough starters must naturally vary greatly. I’ve got two; both rescued from my own neglect; one (called Tigger) was grown from some dried flakes on a dead starter tub and the other (Eeyore) came from the impoverished and terminally sick original. Tigger took off like a rocket – hence the name, and Eeyore was always slower but after months of comparison bakings much nicer and better adapted to the Potwell Inn timetable.

The breakthrough came when I came across Ken Forkish’s book “Evolutions in Bread” and skimmed into a page that described adding conventional dried yeast to the initial sourdough batter after maturing it overnight. You’ve no idea how I resisted the very idea of polluting my sourdough, but I tried it with some leftover supermarket flour and to my great surprise the combination of black iron tin and a sprinkle of yeast halfway through gave just the kind of softer, moister texture with all of the genuine flavour that we were looking for. The photo shows the third batch using Eeyore starter, the heavyweight tin and my favourite organic traditional flour.

The talk

So finally, the talk to the Bath Natural History Society was last Tuesday and as luck would have it, I was speaking in the next door room to A C Grayling the philosopher. He popped his head around the door and I was able to offer my condolences for having to share the evening with me, even if we were in different rooms. He seemed to bear it bravely. As it was I had an audience of around 35 (I didn’t count) – including 3 Vice County Recorders and two national authorities – so anyone with more brains than me would have been intimidated but I was well prepared for a degree of hostility; AI raises very strong feelings so in full diplomatic mode I kicked off with a faked photo of a ghost orchid made (by our son) using Google Gemini. Things could only get better after that, I thought.

As it was the talk went pretty well – I wasn’t aiming at the experts but at the newer members who are quite intimidated by conspicuous upstaging in Latin. I treated it as a kind of seminar where it was acceptable to lob questions at the participants – only one of whom appeared to have nodded off. He paid rapt attention for the rest of the talk. Given that I’d had to teach myself an entirely new programme and use a bunch of software on equipment I’d never seen before, my feared wipeout didn’t happen and the presentation ended just at the moment I caught sight of Madame tapping her watch. What a coincidence!

A Mendip wordfest!

The upper end of Velvet Bottom

Where else in the world could you get the sheer sensual pleasure of writing “buddle pit”; “Velvet Bottom”; and “swallet” in the same sentence? That’s a rhetorical question because there’s no other correct answer except Charterhouse, a tiny hamlet in the Mendip hills, surrounded by what’s called gruffy ground -an area that’s been surface mined for lead and occasionally copper since Roman times if not before that. The names themselves have a vaguely erotic undertone, like West Country soft-porn – unless, that is, you’ve actually been there; and if you’ve been reading this blog for any time you’ll know that it’s one of my favourite places on earth.

So today we decided to celebrate the late autumn and early winter by going for a wander down the valley. It’s an extraordinarily rich environment. Years ago we took the boys for a walk there and spotted two of the biggest adders we’d ever seen – sunning themselves at the bottom of the shallow pit in the photo at the top. This pit, and others further down the valley are the buddle pits where the pounded lead ore was left to settle – the heaviest and richest falling to the bottom. Obviously a pretty dirty and polluting process, and a new sign board near the best preserved dam describes how an angry mob from Cheddar came up and destroyed some of the head works because the polluted water had travelled underground and was emerging in Cheddar where it was killing the fish. The story of pollution – painfully familiar today – didn’t end in Victorian times because not so long ago the residents of Shipham, nearby, were told not to eat produce from their gardens because of residual cadmium pollution from the same group of mines.

Of course this marginal post-industrial landscape is a paradise for plant hunters and is, nowadays, a great place to find some rare plants. Today we watched three Buzzards circling beneath a mob of agitated seagulls which had been enjoying the muck spreading in one of the fields above; but not much by way of wildflowers apart from a few brave Red Campions huddling down in the sheltered pits.

But there’s never a day when you don’t learn something interesting up there, and today it was a lesson in pteridology – ferns. I’m quite new to fern ID, and so I’m still at the disambiguating stage. Bracken is pretty easy, but down in the valley today it was accompanied by almost equal numbers of Common Male ferns. In summer and from a distance the way to tell them apart is that bracken just spreads untidily whereas Male Fern grows in scruffy but obvious shuttlecocks. Today we could see that the bracken in winter dies back to a familiar pale brown, whereas the Male fern turns almost black as it dies back. You can see it quite clearly in the photo at the top, as you can equally see that some kind of banding is going on with the Bracken and Male Fern each having their own preferred spot. All these clues add up towards an instinctive recognition of the jizz of a species. Elsewhere, and all the way down the track, we could see where badgers had been scraping the grass back looking for something to eat.

We stopped and ate a sandwich at Black Rock quarry and then strolled back up rather more quickly as an early sunset was likely under the thick cloud. A nice walk.

Well I promised I’d report back

First attempt at the Ken Forkish method.

I realize, of course, that you may not be as fascinated as I am by sourdough baking; allotmenteering; campervanning; walking; field botany or green spirituality – and if you are fortunate enough not to be bothered by any of them I have no idea why you’re even reading this. My ordinary life would probably be seen as exceptionally boring by most sane people; but then, “ordinary” – to me – is completely fascinating. I sometimes stare at people in a way they might find disconcerting, because every human life is a limitless mystery even if it’s mostly taken up by stuff that’s never going to make it into the newspapers. Even our greatest idiocies and betrayals are crept up on an inch at a time rather than recklessly embraced in an eyes meeting across a crowded room sort of way. We fall in love and fall out of it again; laugh, bawl our eyes out and have cuddles that range from routine maintenance to OMG; love our children and hate them with equal ferocity. We indulge in self-pity and skulduggery, yet occasionally amaze ourselves with an unexpected act of kindness – so yes, I like ordinary, in fact I like it a lot more than exceptional or exciting, an attribute that probably places me on some kind of spectrum.

And having got that off my chest I can write that my new Forkish method loaf came out of the oven just before bedtime last night and it had pancaked spectacularly, exactly as I had anticipated. The whole method was a nightmare of never previously experienced textures; slimy; sticky; cold and wet like a barrel of pilchards. However that wasn’t the end of it because this morning when I hacked a lump off it and spread it with a lustrous layer of butter (I thought I’d better give it half a chance of delighting me) it had all of the rich flavour of my usual bread if a little bit (pleasantly) more acidic. The crust was thinner and much less tooth breaking than usual and the crumb – the actual inner, bread bit – was fabulous. The biggest failing was the collapsed shape which might make one giant flying saucer shaped sandwich if you sliced it horizontally through the middle. The only unforgivable fault was a stratum of flour that must have got there when I tipped more in at a late, panicked, stage and failed to mix it in properly. All in all it was a slow but encouraging first step.

I’ve only got one piece of black iron cookware in the kitchen – a twenty year old crêpe pan that’s never seen the washing up after hundreds if not thousands of crêpes and which never ever sticks. Sadly the new anti-pancake black-iron bread tin got lost in the post when it was sent from Wellington to Bridgewater and then unaccountably to Birmingham instead of Bristol so stage two of the sourdough adventure will have to wait. But even more ordinary screw-ups adorned the day with the blocked sewer downstairs finally being unblocked, but the hot water cylinder in the bathroom springing a leak. Madame was well grumpy by this time and we slept in an uncomfortable silence while the bathroom bucket filled a drip at a time with expensive warm water. On the plus side I had the first civil conversation ever with our landlord’s agent who, after years of getting annoyed with me, has realized that I’m not just grumbling about the black mould to annoy her. Later today we went to the van (you see how ordinary this all is!) and booked in at the garage to get a new cam belt fitted – an expensive job that had me searching the mechanic’s eyes for signs of dissembling : me thinking are you shitting me up? and him thinking (with his best poker face on) “he thinks I’m shitting him up; and him a retired Vicar!” There is, unaccountably, a six week minimum waiting list for this hideously expensive service but I don’t care – our campervan is what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a transitional object, although I think he had rather smaller things like cuddly blankets and teddy bears in mind. It gets us through the darkest days just by being there as a promise of better things to come.

Confession

December 2022

Many years ago before the church drove out the last threads of organised religion from my mind, I used to go to confession in a church carefully chosen miles from home in order that I wouldn’t be recognized. Father Barnard was an old school Anglo Catholic who reputedly slept in his cassock. The first time I went there I was surprised to see the church half full of people, but I soon realized why. Father Barnard was as deaf as a post and so any thought of private confession went out of the window. You had to shout your sins at him – greatly to the amusement of the gathered crowd. Having blurted out your private shame he would invariably dispatch you to the back of church to say the same psalm. It never varied – same old same old – and it was truly cathartic.

Anyway, and in search of the same sense of release I’m offering my full confession to a grave sin, committed this morning in full knowledge of the error of my ways. I added yeast to a sourdough loaf. There we are then, I’ve got it off my chest. A heretical book, well-known to the authorities, has tempted me from the path of righteousness, and lured thousands of us pale and unhealthy backsliders into sin. In a burst of what the Jungians call synchronicity, the sewer in the basement has been blocked and is flooding as a kind of divine retribution and our water heater has developed a leak. The management company has failed to respond to any of our complaints because – as we all know – old people have nothing important to do and so can be safely shunted to the end of the queue. Grumble grumble grumble!!

The plan is to make a serviceable white loaf that lasts a few days and can be cut for sandwiches but tastes great at the same time. Shop bread is so full of preservatives it never seems to go off – you just wake up one morning to find it’s grown a green fur coat. It’s early days, but after following the instructions to the letter I’ve got a sticky, sloppy and wet mass of dough that looks destined to pancake when it hits the oven. I’ve already weakened and added more flour to the dough but I’m not hopeful. Never mind I’ll see it through to the bitter end and – as the politicians always seem to say – lessons will be learned. However it turns out I promise I’ll publish a photo for your entertainment. But yeast in a sourdough loaf? I may never forgive myself.

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.

More sourdough blah blah

Sorry about the spelling.

My friend Don kept a small flock of chickens in his orchard and I remember him telling me that there was one elderly bird in particular which would not lay an egg for weeks – but if he happened to mention in the bird’s presence that it would have to go to the pot he would invariably find an egg the next day. I think Eeyore, my elderly and neglected sourdough starter has a similar temperament. It’s all my own fault, of course, I neglected it shamefully for months because among many other things I didn’t feel like doing, I especially didn’t feel like making bread; far too optimistic an activity for a man sunk deep in melancholia and self-pity. Maybe that should simply read “self pity” because melancholia is essentially a posh middle-class euphemism for it. The stages of starter decrepitude are slow but very visible. No bubbles rise and burst on the surface like methane from a muddy lake bed. It sits there and glowers at me as gradually the golden liquor separates from the sludge and I begin to imagine it will soon be a stinking mess. That happened once many years ago and when I eventually sprang the top on the container the most dreadful smell burst out like a vengeful demon. In the end I had to throw the starter and its container away; both irredeemably contaminated.

I have read about keen but recently converted sourdough penitents advertising for surrogate parents to look after their starters while they pop out to the shops for a morning. This is never necessary because, like all living things, the whole life of a starter strains towards survival and reproduction and so Tarquin’s shopping is astonishingly unlikely to threaten its continued existence. Take heart! sourdough starters can survive almost any catastrophe except being tipped down the sink.

I’ve written about my attempts to revive the original starter but, briefly I fed the original one – maybe 15 years old – and miraculously not at the stinking stage – and watched it sulk for a week or so without so much casting a pinhead bubble. But I also scraped half a gram of dried starter off the top of the pot, added (tap) water and dark rye flour and watched in wonder as it sprang into vigorous action. I’ve never given my starter a name but I decided to call the old one Eeyore and the new one Tigger. Tigger did so well I was able to make the first loaf after a couple of days, which may have been around the time when I mentioned in the presence of Eeyore that I was going to have to let him go. Eeyore responded the next day by throwing a thick foaming head – just like the good old days. The Potwell Inn bakery was back in business and I was able to make side-by-side comparisons of the two starters. Unsurprisingly, (they are genetically identical), there was no difference and we are able to eat decent bread again after a long hiatus of melancholy and indigestion.

The new flour – 100% Maris Widgeon – is demanding some experimentation with baking times and temperatures to avoid the much sought after, (by masochists), palate ripping crust which neither Madame or me enjoy; and thirty six hour proving seems to make a better crumb texture; but then, I’m irredeemably excited by poorly designed experiments with too many variables to draw any conclusions. The sourdough world is full of overly masculine imagery with extreme temperatures and impossible physicality built into the mystique, combined with slashing and frequent applications of cold water. But better than all that nonsense; the Potwell Inn is filled with the fragrance of baking bread once again and the world seems a better place for it.

Making my peace with winter

Frost and mist on the K & A

As it turned out, my brilliant idea of a trip on the canal was a lot more testing than I’d remembered from previous expeditions long ago. The boat – at 65 feet was hard work; like steering a blind carthorse through a minefield. Directions needed to be figured out long before they were undertaken because narrow boats don’t do anything quickly and steering from the unprotected deck in the persistent rain and wind made me feel like Socrates must have felt as the impact of the Hemlock spread through his body. My hands and feet became more and more painful and even regular offerings of Dundee cake and hot tea failed to move the dial.

The canal has become a kind of linear favela. An improvised substitute for non-existent affordable housing, untreated mental health and addiction problems and unemployment amongst young people. Yes of course there are posh well-found boats for second homers and even airBnB offers (check out the combination locks) and there are numerous canal holiday companies but an uneasy truce between the stakeholders looks and feels highly unstable. Then, recently, the number of permanently berthed wide-beam boats has exploded and can make life very difficult when negotiating a sharp bend. Even finding a mooring spot near any of the villages, towns or road bridges is a nightmare. You can tell the struggling boaters from the piled high wet logs, one wheeled bikes and scrap metal piled on the roof. It’s a sad reflection of a betrayed generation left to rot by governments who don’t give a shit.

The last day was by far the coldest and although the sun eventually broke through and dispersed the mist, I was on my knees as we pulled back into the boatyard. I’m getting a bit old for this malarkey. Our joy was complete when, after we’d loaded up the car, we discovered the battery was beyond flat; rather – dead. Luckily one of the engineers (we’d seen so much of them trying to fix the heating during the trip that they felt like friends) saved the day with a portable lithium battery.

But there’s always a plus side, and this photo taken in a quiet stretch between Avoncliff and Dundas shows the beauty of the autumn trees. The lone fisherman, by the way, gave us a short seminar on how boaters should pass to preserve harmony. He said that many boats tried to pull over to the opposite (shallow) side instead of holding to the middle – thereby stirring up the mud and ruining the fishing altogether.

I’ve always had difficulties with this season. The dying of the light drains the joy out of me and I seem to lose all motivation. But every year – I ought to know this by now – there’s a kind of Kübler Ross moment of acceptance and – as if a switch has been thrown – I feel OK again. I woke up at 5.00am on Sunday and paid an outstanding bill and then fetched my sourdough starter from its hiding place in the kitchen; unscrewed the lid gingerly and sniffed, expecting the worst. It was fine and a lightning bolt of optimism shot through me. Back during lockdown when everyone was making sourdough, the internet forums were full of newcomers suffering from starter anxiety and wondering whether it was even possible to take a break from feeding the ever demanding baby. Yeasts, I should say, are lovely, useful and tiny organisms and are rather harder to kill than Bindweed. I often neglect my starter shamefully – I’ve had it for well over a decade – and it still comes back and fills the kitchen with a delightful apple fragrance. Interestingly, no-one I’ve given it to has managed to keep it alive for any length of time. Has it micro-evolved to the exact conditions of the Potwell Inn kitchen? We’ll be off to the mill this week to get some decent organic flour and all will be well and all manner of things will be well once more.

So I made my peace with winter and spent most of yesterday walking (in my head) on the estuary of the river Esk in Cumbria where it joins the Irish Sea.

We were here in late August 2019 and I took a few photos of flowers I didn’t recognize. Five years later and my plan to organise retrospectively some of the 13,000 photos into a botanical database brought me back again in memory to this beautiful and bleak area, just south of Sellafield. The initial plan was to add Sneezewort to the file, but then I noticed another bunch of photos with nothing but a date and location in the EXIF data. First impression was that they were all pictures of Samphire except that when I looked properly it was clear that they were all three of them different plants and that none of them was Samphire. I should add that there was an abundance of Samphire around but that the proximity to Sellafield would make the eating of anything found on the seashore pretty dangerous! Anyway, in a very contented few hours I’d nailed all three and added them to the database; all of them shoreline and estuary specialists.

Sea Lavender, Sea Purslane, and Sea Aster.