Category: Eudaimonia – flourishing

It’s today – weeeeeeee!

Choices, choices. Should I illustrate the beginning of a new era with a sunrise, or the end of an old one with a sunset? And what should the photograph express? Should it be triumphal? a resolution achieved; or should it be a lamentation for the passing of the moment? In the end I opted for a misty sunrise over the river in spate, with the architectural vacuity of the Crest Nicholson development, the Dredge Bridge and a solitary seagull – because every adventure has to begin where you are. In any case I’m only meeting a personal target. Nothing will change and I’ll stagger over the finishing line wondering what all the fuss was about. The stars and planets will not align in any special manner; no flowers will bloom as I walk to the shops. It will be a perfectly ordinary winter day; grey, drizzly and cold enough to wear my favourite Shackleton jumper – scratchy, warm and smelling of the Welsh mountain sheep who gifted their woolly coats for my benefit. This blog, and my life will continue in much the same way as a celebration of the ordinary because ordinary becomes the capitalised “Ordinary” when you see through the distractions.

And what of it? ten years of trying to make sense of a stolen world that’s lost the will to live. Ten years of being governed by the clueless and the sociopathic, the narcissistic, the spineless and their goons – kept in power by the infinitely malleable consciences of Pavlov’s voters who’d kill their mothers for a Greggs sausage roll. I think I’ve explained that enough. I’m off to a quieter place where I can breathe.

Keeping a journal is one thing. Publishing it day by day is another altogether because there’s so little happening. No juicy confessions of sins committed or even intended because my life is straightforwardly dull. Got up; looked at my watch; made tea; ate five biscuits which I dunked; got up again and made coffee; counted out the day’s medications; emptied the dishwasher; went back to bed and read an interesting book on fungi. There’s nothing there to attract the attention because the real interest is always in the interaction between the mundane and the mind. Who was that rough sleeper outside Sainsbury’s? How did he get there? what were the crucial choices in his life that led him to the pavement and a life of begging? How did those two shoplifters teach themselves their routine of violent quarreling to escape investigation by the two police who stopped them and then backed away? Does this charity shop smell of old clothes? Is the man in that couple over there being attentive or controlling? Why is my plate cold?

The romance of life is always there but sometimes you have to look for it. The unusual plant growing in a crack in the pavement isn’t going to shout out to you; you just have to be interested enough to look. The otter swimming in the river, the little shoal of Dace glittering in the shallows, the Fumitory on the allotment that – aside from being an invasive pest – is just different enough to warrant further investigation.

When our first child was just old enough we would walk up Granby Hill in Clifton which still had its cobbled gutters and it could take an eternity because he was so fascinated by the discarded litter trapped in the cracks between the setts. Cigarette buts, silver foil, broken glass, bits of shiny metal and twigs all seemed to bewitch him. He would slowly walk on, head down, savouring each and every object as if it were a treasure waiting to be discovered. I was always happy when he was engaged in this way. It’s a fundamental human act to weave stories, myths and legends around the ordinary and everyday.

I’ve been around a long time, and worked in many places that were rich with stories. I suppose that’s where I learned how to value them. People, it turned out, rarely wear their experiences on their sleeves, but with a bit of prompting and some patience, the most unpromising lives can suddenly blaze, flame out like a reignited log on a fire. The Severn Pilot who would walk the banks of the river on his days off in order to memorise the shifting of the safe passages who was walking one day in thick fog when a small tanker heading for Sharpness came slowly past and a voice called out “Is that you, Peter?” The cider maker known by everyone as “Doughnut” whose name was bestowed on his first day at primary school when he wore a white shirt with a red band around it and whose drinking had put him into a hostel and who grew a lovely garden there and told me some of the unexpected tricks of his trade. The nickname persisted as long as the community that attached it. Another old man who told me how they hid barrels of cider from the Customs and Excise under the hedges to avoid exceeding their permitted limit. The oldest man I’d ever buried; 103 years old who moved in with his son who was in his 70’s when he was 90 and told him that the garden was a disgrace and then dug it from end to end. The electrical engineer who had saved a fellow worker’s life with his first aid training and told me it was one of the most powerful experiences of his life. You could easily pass any one of them on the street and not notice them, but give them some time and you’ll discover for yourself the power of the Ordinary.

I’ve never forgotten a visit to an old man to arrange his wife’s funeral. Back in the day he’d been an old Redcliffe boy and played rugby for the Old Reds. He was in a wheelchair with both legs amputated. As we chatted he asked if I’d like to see a photograph of his wife. Of course I said yes – I’m always a sucker for a photograph – and he pulled out a photo that had been taken on his honeymoon which only amounted to a single night in a Weymouth hotel. They were both standing on the promenade, he in his casuals; white open necked shirt and pressed trousers that, true to the fashions of the day, looked loose and baggy but you could see he was something of a catch. She – standing next to him – was just so stunningly beautiful I’ve never forgotten her. A faded and rather crumpled black and white photo came to me in a blaze of light and I learned something about the fragility of life and the way that love blesses everything it comes into contact with.

So yes, the Ordinary is anything but ordinary and – as the saying goes – for a hero the harbour is the place you set out from, although it’s good to get back to it when the sea’s rough and the wind is blowing a gale. I’ve had ten years of retirement and ten years of typing away at this blog and it’s been the most tremendous fun; learning entirely new skills, taking up field botany and doing some serious photography. I’m still struggling to get my head around an intellectually satisfying account of how the concepts green and spirituality could be linked into some way of fending off our collective descent into a hell of our own making and I fully intend to keep going with this blog and my love affair with the Ordinary as long as I can. Madame and I are very happy living in our virtual pub, even if outsiders might see it as a small flat in a concrete building. I knew this moment would be lacking in drama but there we are. I’ve just completed one million and thirteen words about the Potwell Inn.

Next!

Jam tomorrow

While Madame was pruning she was joined by a pair of robins

Yesterday we finished all the pruning except for a couple of dangerously barbed gooseberries which demand thicker gloves than we had with us. It’s the tenth anniversary year of the first allotment – the one where Madame is standing, on the day we were offered it; 14th April 2016. I think she’s looking a bit dubious. It seemed as if it had a long history of abandonment – each successive tenant adding a new player of plastic sheet, carpet, children’s’ toys and even a bicycle dumped in the wooden compost bin behind her. There was a random and unidentifiable tree and some raspberry canes but other than that it was Couch grass, Cocksfoot and Bindweed all the way.

We decided that the only way to get on top of it was to beast it and so, where we could get at the surface layers of plastic we pulled them out. The carpet was harder – not that it deterred the weeds – and so we strimmed the whole plot, burnt it off with several passes of our big flame gun and then double dug it. None of these, of course, were the kind of methods we were hoping to use, but kindness and no- dig organic treatments don’t bother the kind of weed infestation we were dealing with. Neither, by the way, does glyphosate which (apart from being carcinogenic), barely gives the weeds a headache. The raspberries were old and clapped out and so after a couple of seasons we replaced them. The exact spot where Madame was standing is where we now have the fruit garden in the top photo whose blackcurrants we pruned yesterday. The soil wasn’t bad at all, but inclined to ball up in wet weather – it’s alluvial clay loam – and since we moved on to the plot we’ve added what must be tons of compost and manure. The battle with the weeds never ends, of course, because the more we feed the soil the more they like it. We try to keep on top of the weeds in the fruit garden by feeding, mulching with fleece which we get from our friends smallholding in the Bannau Brycheiniog and then covering the whole lot with wood chip. The fleece disappears in a year, shared with nesting birds who especially like it for lining nests, and the wood chip also rots down surprisingly fast. This creates a loose covering mulch of about six inches above the mineral soil layer from which we can pull out the bindweed by hand. It’s terribly invasive but it’s also lazy enough to take the easy route. True to our original plan the whole plot has been organic and largely no-dig for the last ten years.

The second plot came to us a year later and that one was a world of pain from the outset. Apart from the previous tenant who was evicted for not maintaining it and made regular nocturnal visits to steal and vandalize by way of revenge; there were no less than three layers of nylon carpet in successive strata. You can see from the photo just how useless carpet is as a long term weed control method. The weeds simply grow through it, consolidating its rot-proof woven base with roots. If you look closely at couch grass roots, you’ll notice that they end in a spear which can pass through the smallest holes – including those in a thick weed control mat. We used the same strim / firestorm plus double digging technique and in time it yielded to our determination. The two plots are next door to one another and together amount to about the same area as an old-school “ten rod” allotment plot of about 250 square metres – enough to feed a family of four.

Allotments are the perfect antidote to the next-day delivery culture which saturates our online culture. The very fastest of crops take six weeks from sowing in perfect conditions; an asparagus bed takes at least three years and an orchard ten years except for Damsons which can take up to fifteen to reach full productivity. In the past ten years our plots have reached some kind of maturity. They look and feel like grown-up plots now they’ve adjusted to the way we use them. There’s always a choice to be made between artificially rushing crops and letting them take their time. In the end I suspect it’s as good for us – developing our patience and resilience – as it is for the crops which need time to give their fullest flavours.

Jam tomorrow promises are traditionally used by politicians as a smokescreen for the fact that they’ve neither the means or the will to fulfill them. The phrase was first used by Lewis Carroll in Alice through the Looking Glass. Pie in the sky might be a similar kind of promise. But jam tomorrow really means something in the Potwell Inn allotment, because the work that we did yesterday will bear fruit and hopefully some blackcurrant jam in the late summer. Pruning encourages a bigger crop by opening out the bush to light and air and by removing the old, non-fruiting stems, to keep the size of the bush under control. On Friday I discovered a cache of blackcurrant jam in a cardboard box which – had it been outside in a shower of rain – would definitely have had a rainbow leading to it.

We bought this book in the 1960’s and have used it ever since.

We’ve got ten trees on our plot – apples, pears, plums, and damsons; plus blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants, tayberries, blackberries and strawberries. All of them need various different types of pruning and in the case of the strawberries, of propagation. Of course they’ll grow, however neglected they are but they won’t thrive. Since they all bear fruit in a short summer season we spent almost equal amounts of time bottling, pickling, freezing, jamming, drying and making cordials. You might wonder if it isn’t all a massive waste of time when Sainsbury’s are a five minute walk away – and unless you grow your own you’ll never know just how wonderfully rich the taste of freshly picked vegetables can be. We’re not wealthy but we live like kings!

If you knew how many times a Cox apple needed to be sprayed in a season to make it supermarket perfect, you’d probably never eat another, unless you picked it yourself from an organic orchard. We don’t grow them because of their need for sprays. But we can grow lovely apples that are bred for disease resistance, just as we grow tomatoes and potatoes that are bred for blight resistance.

The food industry has a stranglehold on almost all western politics and the introduction of novel ingredients to the food we eat may be reflected in the growth of diseases that reflect it. But it’s not new. My friend Howard – a Brooklyn New Yorker, remembers his childhood when bottled milk smelt of formaldehyde. Food adulteration at a criminal level has always been present; flour being particularly vulnerable to additions like ground chalk . Wherever there’s a profit to be made, there will be an unprincipled supplier who’s willing to exploit it. If you want to eat safely, growing an allotment or a garden is one simple way of ensuring that at least some of your diet is unadulterated. Sometimes the boldness is astounding.

I’ve been reading a marvellous book on fungi by Brian Spooner and Peter Roberts in the Collins New Naturalist Library series. It’s an absolutely comprehensive introduction to all things fungal, from athletes’ foot to fly agarics and includes an eye opening section on “food,folklore and traditional use” which reads:

Cudbear was a commercial enterprise started in 1758 in Edinburgh by one George Gordon, who originally called his new dye ‘cuthbert’ after his mother’s maiden name. The manufactory moved to Glasgow where up to 250 tons of Ochrolechia tartarea [a lichen found in Scotland] were processed annually, originally collected from the Highlands and islands, but later imported from Scandinavia, the Canary Islands, and Malta. The ammonia used in processing the dye was distilled from Glaswegian urine, of which no less than 2000-3000 gallons were required each day. The Glasgow manufactory closed in 1852, much to the dismay of Lindsay (1856) who hoped that a ‘revival and extension of this traffic would probably prove a great boon to that remnant of the Celtic race, which is fast disappearing from our shores’. Cudbear continued to be manufactured in small quantities in England up to the 1950s, most of it exported to the USA for use as a purple food colouring and for dyeing leather.

I think that when it comes to importing chlorinated chicken from the US, we’ll have got our revenge in first. “Another slice of Scottish purple iced piss cake, Bishop?”

Nature, as we understand it as gardeners, is far from natural but our massive intervention – even as organic gardeners – can be constructive or, as in the case of intensive farming, extremely damaging to the environment, and here I have a bit of a disagreement with some environmentalists about the way in which we present the dangers. I’m an amateur field botanist; that’s to say I go out with Madame on long walks – looking for plants and recording them. Occasionally we find something quite rare and that’s both rewarding and exciting. On one occasion we even found one of them growing on the allotment. It’s a tragedy when even one plant goes extinct, but it’s only a true tragedy for the handful of people who even know what it is. As CP Scott, nephew of the first editor of the Manchester Guardian would say to his journalists of a dud story – “it cracks no pots in Warrington” Interestingly – possibly only to me – he was born in Bath. If we want to convince people of the price we’ll pay for climate breakdown, we’re going to have to crack a few more pots – and not just in Warrington. The so-called green revolution offered to feed the poorer nations by selling them tractors, agrochemicals and (now patented) seeds – and it caused far more harm than good. Our own cheap food revolution is wreaking havoc with public health. Starvation, migration, flooding, extreme weather, the rise in diabetes and cancers – these are all pot cracking issues in Warrington whereas the extinction of a small population of plants halfway up a mountain is a symptom and not the core of the issue. The earth is showing symptoms of sickness and one of those symptoms is species extinction. What we have to do is to move the scientific symptom into the political debate and our government is showing no signs of moving beyond hand wringing to the kind of changes we need to achieve. The honest answer to people who worry about the cost of environmental change is that it’s going to be painful and expensive and we’re going to have to give up some things we’ve grown to depend on. But the alternative of continuing in the way we’ve been going is catastrophic. This critical debate, one way or another, is going to crack a lot of pots in Warrington and across the western world. The majority of us have little or no experience of growing our own food but we have everything to gain by learning.

Finally the ducks are all in a row

You’ve no idea how lovely it is to feel well again; to wake up in the morning full of ideas; relishing each day and going out on our walks once more; a bit further each time. I still don’t know with any certainty what was wrong with me but in the end – and by default because they’d looked at every other possibility – I think it all boiled down to iron deficiency anaemia caused by polyps in my colon which were removed by a lovely team at the RUH and then, after a troubled start on iron tablets which initially made me sicker than ever, they were changed for another type and apart from the bother of waking myself up to take them at 5.00am, I feel better than I’ve felt for around 18 months. Hooray for the NHS and the Royal United Hospital ….. and for our GP who started the ball rolling on what must have been a hunch.

So last year didn’t go too well on the travel front – rescued twice by the AA and ignominiously towed home on a trailer; the engine blew up once, cambelt, water pump, clutch and alternator needed replacing and two trips were cancelled before they even began. But that was then and this is now and the van, Madame and me are ready for (amost) anything but especially for a trip to the Lizard which was just ravaged by storm Goretti and lost both water, electricity and internet for a couple of days. We’re staying in a rented clifftop cottage and the photos at the top were all taken through the half-door; the one on the bottom left taken early on the morning of our last departure. Every time we leave it feels like a small bereavement – there’s a bit of my soul living there permanently.

Having spent several years on the neighbourhood plants – Lizard is a botanical hotspot – I’ve just finished fixing up a moth trap. It’s very early in the year and we don’t expect more than a handful of visitors, but in many ways a slow start is the best way for beginners like us. The more projects we embark on, the more the planning resembles a military campaign – laptops, mobile wiFi router and aerial, books, maps, food; cameras, lenses, tripods, kitchen sink. You get the picture. I’ve even bought a new, clonking great monograph on hedgerows to keep me happy if it rains non-stop, and that’s happened on several previous trips.

Eskdale 2019

Taking photographs is only a fraction of the battle, though. Identifying the plant in question is three quarters of the fun. For instance the little darling below was – so far as I was concerned – a white form of death cap that we found on the edge of a wood in Cumbria a few years ago. It’s been labelled and sitting in the photos folder for years until yesterday when I was reading a brilliant monograph on fungi in the New Naturalist series – when I discovered that it also looked very like another fungus known as Destroying Angel which really is white. In the intervening years I’ve learned how to access the massive power of databases and so I checked on the largest I could find and discovered that neither of the fungi is even recorded close to the place we found it, but that even so my initial identification was more likely to be correct. There is a test to distinguish them but of course the subject of the photo is long gone and so it will always remain an unanswerable question.

That’s the thing about nature, it seems far more malleable than we would wish. It would be fairer to say that short of a full DNA profile almost all our identifications are provisional. Like weather forecasts ID’s are correct on the basis of percentages. 100% certainty is rarer than we’d like. Of course that merely means that we should be more modest about our certainties. A couple of days ago we were on a plant hunt and I overheard someone airily identifying a Feverfew with a lot more conviction than I would dare to offer. In fact, the more I learn about fungi the less likely I am ever to forage for them. Both the Death Cap and the Destroying Angel are regularly and fatally confused with edible fungi. No thanks, then, I’ll have the fish fingers!

So, the packing lists are all made and the kit is all checked over, charged up and wrapped. You would think we were off up the Amazon but you need to remember that as a list addict, planning is almost as much fun as getting there. It doesn’t always work of course, we once drove up to Pembrokeshire for a camping holiday only to discover I’d left all the tent poles behind. On another occasion I forgot the air mattresses, and after a trip to the local supermarket we bought a couple of air beds that were so thick and luxurious our noses were almost touching the flysheet.

But at this moment I can hardly contain my excitement at the prospect of waking up to the sound of the sea and walking between fields and hedgerows which – being much further south – are just beginning to wake up. Bring it on! – we say.

Losing my religion – again

18th March 2017 – River Wye at Hay

On the 18th March 2017 at 12.30 pm standing beside the river Wye beneath the road bridge from Hay I watched the water flooding past and realized that it had gone again. It wasn’t a great shock. It had been no greater than a ghostly presence from not long before I retired. It was sudden but completely undramatic. “Oh well” I thought, as I turned away from the river, “That’s it then”. I’d had plenty of previous experiences of sudden changes in my ways of understanding the world and where I belonged in it but it took a while to describe it in anything like useful ways.

Imagine a snake, or a dragonfly larva. Snakes shed their skins as they grow out of them and they begin to wear out. Larvae of all kinds go through a period of shape shifting and as pupae go through various distinctive stages known as instars before the final stage in which a butterfly, or moth or dragonfly emerges, mates and begins the cycle once more. Much as we might wish that nature stood still, it’s always changing. Seasons pass, crops grow and are harvested, young animals are born and pass through widely different life-cycles before they die. The soil; the earth isn’t an inert growing medium it’s teeming with unimaginably numerous interdependent life forms. From the window of our flat we see a small park, trees and the passing river. It’s never still for a moment. However we describe nature it’s hard to use descriptions like peace and tranquility with any honesty. Nature is not a static thing at all; things grow and change and – if we’ve any kind of living faith in anything; any attachment that you might loosely call spirituality – we have to learn to allow for growth and the occasionally major changes that come with it. Some people call losing their faith a tragedy I don’t agree. You have to lose the old, worn-out ideas and attachments in order to grow. Love cannot exist without the certainty of loss.

So I want to describe what I think are two key factors in thinking about these big changes in belief. Firstly, the image of skin shedding in snakes and the shapeshifting of instars isn’t just a fanciful metaphor. These natural life-forms (as we are too) have no alternative, and neither have we if you think about it. Human beliefs also have life expectancy. Religious belief is especially prone to calcification. There’s a gradual descent, for instance from sacrament to ritual, and from ritual to tradition then finally from tradition to habit. Rudolph Otto used the term “numinous” to describe the mysterious and overwhelming sense that floods our minds seemingly directly and not mediated by the senses or the intellect. One word that’s often used to describe such an experience is sacramental. Ordinary everyday things seem to glow with meaning even as they remain entirely themselves. But as these sacramental experiences calcify they lose their fascination and power to move us and become worthless as agents in the next key factor which is the change in perspective that comes at the same time. These powerful experiences don’t fiddle about with the natural world so it becomes more colourful or beautiful; what changes is the way in which we perceive it.

So why do we fight so hard to turn these religious or spiritual moments into stone? Why on earth would we want to freeze revelations until they become unintelligible, meaningless to anyone else. Traditions are the barnacles that police the boundaries of sacred space.

I sometimes seem to receive messages; dreams and waking dreams. I wouldn’t say that these sudden insights are frequent visitors and I’ve always thought of them as being perfectly natural – not hallucinations but just the deep parts of my mind making creative connections and expressing them as poetic ideas. For me, by the time I retired, the sacramental seemed to have turned into ritual where getting it right had become more important than entering the mystery. I frequently tag these pieces with the phrase “green spirituality”, which I’m afraid raises more questions than it settles. Most of the pieces are grasping at possible meanings for it and which I’ve yet to find myself. I’m not coming to this as an expert in any sense. What I’m certain of is that the West in particular is suffering from some kind of spiritual crisis which is eating away at our humanity. I’m just trying to find a way through the rubble, and one possible first step follows:

In the episode of Rick Stein’s Australia that aired on BBC Two on January 6, 2026, Rick Stein spoke with two Aboriginal women in Sydney who shared their knowledge of native food ingredients.They were part of the the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. But what knocked me over wasn’t a recipe or anything like that. It was the way they described themselves as being part of the earth. Doesn’t that perfectly describe our western estrangement from the earth. We know there’s something wrong, and we create libraries of books and films on the beauty and healing power of nature but the problem isn’t solved by sitting under a tree, reading a book or watching a video, because we should be working on mending that broken relationship.

But in spite of any misgivings we’re constantly bombarded with the idea that nature has healing powers. Go for a walk they say, and feel the power of nature. Perhaps nature’s a bit shy when it comes to sceptics like me, but in the hundreds if not thousands of miles I’ve walked fields and tracks both here in the UK and in Europe I’ve yet to experience that power unless I was actively engaging with nature at the same time; listening to and identifying birds; watching and recording wildlife – especially plants. Reading about them, studying them especially the ones in the middle of Bath and outside our front door. Like everybody else I’m excited when I read about aboriginal and first nation people and their connectedness with the earth, but First Nation peoples have a far more intimate relationship with nature than we do. It goes so much further than providing food and shelter. It includes an intimate knowledge of plant locations, special properties and healing potential. When a First Nation person goes for a solitary walk, friends and acquaintances in the plant and animal kingdoms crowd in on them. They even talk to them -which sounds odd until I think that we talk to our plants on the allotment, ask them how they’re doing? is there anything they need? and they respond – more water; more light; get rid of those bugs but leave the others. I don’t believe in the supernatural and I don’t use those voices to claim an unchallengeable religious advantage, it’s just a feature of the unconscious mind in some sort of resonance with whatever you call it – let’s provisionally say the Tao.

I do believe that underlying Nature, of which we’re a part, is some kind of rule bearing substratum. Doesn’t it strike you as absolutely miraculous that behind the mind blowing diversity of nature there lies a silent orderliness that can only be intuited and – it seems – and never fully described. “Whereof we cannot speak , thereof we must remain silent” said Wittgenstein. “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao” – said Lao Tzu It’s that fundamental orderliness without which science would not be possible and neither would the tools of the artist, the musician and the poet. We’re all – in Dylan Thomas’s words –“dumb to tell the crooked rose. My youth is driven by the same wintry fever”.

So, to try to be a bit practical for once; how can anyone move on from just liking a walk in the woods to developing that intimate relationship with nature which is the true source of healing and fulfilment. Well I’m sure there are thousands of suggestions out there offering suffering and discomfort in abundance, not to mention subscriptions. Ten years ago I leaned on the sea wall rails in St Ives at New Year and realized that I had no idea what kind of gull I was looking at. I made a stupid resolution that I wouldn’t pass anything, ever again, that I couldn’t name. I think that lasted just about long enough for me to cross the road and buy a bird book. But out of acorns, great oaks grow, and I changed the way I observed nature, started to photograph plants, bought books when I could afford them and began keeping rudimentary records. I bought a pocket lens and discovered that the closer I looked the more fascinating things became. There was no conflict between science, creativity and nature, because the more I understood the more beautiful nature became.

For the first couple of years I started to keep a secret journal; one which no-one else would ever see. But then, changing technology killed the software I was using and so I started this blog; tracking the long journey into the new. If anyone else can make use of it as a guide or a map then I’ll be pleased. You might well spot me one day on my hands and knees in the mud. I might be meditating or I might be examining a flower in great detail. I’m not sure I can tell the difference!

Who are you? lovely apple!

After a day’s marmalade making and campervan maintenance yesterday, this was supposed to be a day’s R&R, but a fateful discussion with our neighbour Charlie over coffee this morning sent us back home on a mission to cook the last of our stored apples before they became the object of another of my great interests in moulds. These apples still lack a conclusive name in spite of searching all the databases we could find. We have, I think, narrowed it down to two possibilities – either the French/Belgian dessert apple Api Noir but more likely the American apple Arkansas Black. The reason for ranking them that way is that the apple we picked has the most extraordinary flavour of vanilla, but to be honest there’s not much information to be had on either variety except that Chris Bowers’ nursery sells the French one and no-one that I can find sells the other American one – which is a real shame because (aside from its size) it’s got everything going for it; self-pollinating, disease resistant and late flowering and therefore fruiting avoiding frosts. Api Noir is counted mainly as a decorative apple, but Arkansas Black is rated for its flavour. The downside is that it’s a very small apple and so a bother to peel and core. On the other hand it’s so sweet we cook it without any added sugar and it keeps it shape and soft texture even after cooking – a bit like the English Cox apple. The right hand photo at the top gives an impression of this but also looks like a plate of witchetty grubs which is so wrong!

It happened that our neighbour Charlie had just acquired several books from the Marcher (as in Welsh/English border counties) Apple Network and so our conversation inexorably slanted towards apples and our common interest in them. We had a bag of the American apple hanging in a bag in the dangerously warm and damp kitchen and as soon as we got home I sorted the rotters, washed the rest and after a ploughman’s’ lunch we set to to peel and core them and then Madame cooked them with a knob of butter but no added sugar. The perfume of the apples is outrageous and develops even more during a couple or three weeks of storage so it’s well worth the additional effort of peeling them.

There’s very little point in trying to grow them from seeds because unfortunately most apples don’t come true – that’s why there are so many varieties. The only way to multiply them is to graft them on to established rootstocks which is a bit of a skilled operation. Nonetheless Madame is going to give it a try this coming year because she once learned how to do it at Long Ashton Cider Research Station. It would be a tremendous achievement to breed a new generation of these lovely apples but of course we don’t have space or the money to grow more than a couple of trees on the allotment.

The rest of my day was spent on homework with the biological records spreadsheet. It’s always been my way to learn by going back to first principles and then slowly building a picture in my mind. The disadvantage is that it makes me an agonisingly slow learner – but on the other hand when I’m done I know the subject with real fluency. I’ve come to regard my awkwardness as a strength rather than a weakness – but many of my old teachers would probably disagree!

Anyway, there will be stewed apple for supper today. I can’t wait.

KIng Charles the Martyr – in a jar?

When you’re as old as me, you’ll probably find yourself saying “many years ago; when ….” – rather too often, since that’s the point when you realize that your children no longer care about, let alone believe your stories. But I’m not going to be caught out that way. I’ll merely say …….

I was on a silent retreat in a Franciscan convent in Dorset and since I was the only man present I was sequestered alone in a cottage on the edges of the estate. Meals were conducted in silence apart from the first five minutes of the one o’clock news on the BBC controlled rigidly by the Superior. Conversation was not allowed and so you had to learn some kind of sign language to get hold of the salt. The silence was only broken once – this was in the period of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest pomp – when it was announced that she’d shut down a couple more coal mines and a steelworks. One of the younger sisters was unable to contain a long snort of hatred and derision. We shared a conspiratorial smile among ourselves and went on with lunch – knowing that if we didn’t eat it all, it would come back meal after meal until it grew whiskers. I remember an old friend, a retired orthopaedic surgeon saying on his 90th birthday that the trouble with thriftiness was that you never got to eat a decent apple. The table rituals were both arcane and hilarious. We were each given a coloured napkin ring and told to sit at whichever place we found it on. What we weren’t told was that no one could leave the table until the final napkin was rolled and replaced in its ring. Needless to say I was the first victim of the rule, but I got my revenge by making everyone wait for each subsequent meal by sitting there beaming until I got bored. It was there that I discovered that I’m absolute rubbish at silence. I much preferred the Benedictines where they were still silent but you got a glass of wine with lunch and one of the monks read aloud from an interesting book.

Anyway the Franciscans were devotedly high church Anglicans and one of the curiosities was their attachment to martyrs, not least King Charles 1st it seems. By and large they were a radical bunch who really did walk the walk, but I was caught out by a jam jar on the table at breakfast time which was plainly labelled “King Charles the Martyr”. God knows (I thought religiously) what’s in there and I wish it would be marmalade but the thought that it might actually contain some sort of relic held me back. A single hair or fingernail would have made me feel very ill. And in any case was it entirely correct to celebrate the memory of the slaughtered king by eating him? Was this sacramental food in some arcane sense? or was it a witty joke by a rebellious sister? and if not – what?

Madame and I really like marmalade, but ever since the invention of Hartley’s “New Jam” – which was as watered down as “New Labour” turned out to be and then sold in smaller jars to add insult to injury, shop bought marmalade- in fact most shop bought jam too has lost most of its fruitiness because it’s lost most of its fruit. If you want the real thing you have to make it yourself. The Potwell Inn has one small problem in that I prefer my marmalade chunky and Madame likes it thin cut with as little peel as possible. This results in half finished jars having all their juices spooned out leaving dense faggots of orange flavoured brushwood at the bottom. I bear it bravely but it gives me terrible hiccoughs. I will get to the point ASAP.

So my family always made marmalade and home made jams, preserves and pickles have always been part of my life. My mum strayed from the path of righteousness at some point in the past and started to use the tinned, pre-shredded and cooked to be sold in giant tins. It didn’t feel right and we’ve never yielded t0 the temptation. If we’ve done the numbers right, we have marmalade all year round but sometimes we run out and then the wait for early January when the Seville oranges come in is a festival of longing. This year and true to tradition they arrived on January 2nd. It was only this week that I finally joined the dots regarding King Charles the Martyr. His execution took place on December 30th and so it’s just possible that the Sevilles arrived a bit early the year of my retreat and that Sister Angela, or whichever one was cooking that week, commemorated the religious festival on a jar of marmalade. It made me think of the Benedictine aphorism that “to work is to pray and to pray is to work”

But marmalade making is equally a thanksgiving festival for me; along with Christmas puddings and Christmas cakes. It’s impossible not to think of my mum and my gran as I’m chopping and simmering, boiling and bottling. It’s a ceremony that requires faith in the future; that we’ll be there to enjoy all fifteen jars in the course of this new year. It’s our opportunity to prepare and eat the best of food rather than the blandest and cheapest industry can manage. It’s hard work slicing the peel of 4 Kg of oranges and I have to keep sharpening the knife. My hands and wrists ache from the effort but it gives a long space of time to meditate and savour the grace of the ingredients and their journey to our kitchen where they fill the flat with their lovely fragrance. The whole act of making marmalade collapses time, prompting an escape from all the anxieties of the present moment, and it’s free; no books (the recipe is so simple) no gurus, churches or self-help groups; and if praying for King Charles 1st is your bag – that’s fine too; it wouldn’t be mine but feel free if its yours.

The Sisters and the Covent are long gone, scattered across the country and perhaps absorbed into other groups but I remember them with great fondness. The Franciscan movement has something to say to us, even now. They could be trailblazers in the search for a new and all embracing spirituality of the natural world – it’s there in the foundational writings of St Francis from the beginning. Every religious movement has to learn to live with its Jabez Bunting and its Brother Elias. The women did better with Hildegard of Bingen and Sister Clare, but there’s always a battle between the bureaucratic and the visionary when the founder dies and the battle for succession begins.

As for the Potwell Inn we opt for the quiet life and do our best to preserve it.

On plants and parasites

For the most part, over the years, I’ve seen New Year more as a celebration that the old year is over and done with and that January 1st is no more than a blank canvas. But this time it was different because 2025 was pretty rubbish, what with innumerable health problems and having to spend a fortune getting the campervan fixed. By the end of the year the health problems along with the van repairs were largely sorted and we were free to resume our itinerant lives; gardening, exploring and recording wildlife and camping unencumbered by worries. It was an exhilarating feeling to be set free to imagine once again. The three resolutions of last year were largely fulfilled and I lay awake making excited plans for 2026.

So after the most optimistic start to 2026, I had a sudden attack of dust and ashes, partially caused by this plant. It’s called Greater Dodder and it was growing so inconspicuously down by the river I would probably never have noticed it. Fortunately the leader of the BSBI New Year plant hunt that we were on, clocked it and we all gathered around to see a very unusual (RR in the books) plant. We’ve seen its much more common relative in Pembrokeshire and North Wales but it was a lovely surprise to see it growing on our local patch. It’s a parasitic plant, related to bindweed (gardeners feel free to hiss) and this one grows especially on nettles.

However the excitement was followed almost straight away by the sense of disappointment that I hadn’t found it for myself. Anyway I photographed it and when we got home looked it up in the books and discovered that it’s been here near the river in Bath for a few years at least and that it prefers growing near water. In fact – to borrow a term from the police procedurals on the telly – it’s got form – a great reminder that the more you know about wildlife preferences the more likely you are to find what you’re looking for.

And so the roller coaster in my brain continued for a while as I pondered how to record it – and as spring follows winter the idea dropped into my mind that it would be a good idea to extend my database to include all the other things we find on our walks; birds, fungi, insects, ferns, slime moulds ( a recent obsession) and lepidoptera because we’ve now got a portable moth trap that won’t take up too much space in the campervan.

It sounds so easy doesn’t it? extend the database which lives in a spreadsheet file so that instead of having to open separate files for each interest, it all sits on one very large spreadsheet so I could, for example, look at everything we found on a certain day, or everything we’ve ever found in a certain place; I could assemble lists for every purpose and even draw pie charts. I was (temporarily) on fire at the possibility of using AI to do all the heavy lifting and slept very badly, basking in the excitement and imagining fine days in Cornwall walking down to Percuil, looking for orchids and listening to the Curlews calling on the mud flats; or in the Bannau Brycheiniog watching the mist below in the valleys or in North Wales feasting on wild mushrooms and watching gannets dive bombing the sea.

That lasted as long as it took to sit in front of the computer and figure out how to do it. My grasp of spreadsheets and how to manipulate them is minimal to non-existent. I am at the sub-beginner level – I just make lists – so I started slowly by finding out that a tab on a spreadsheet is not the same as a tab on a beer can or the one on an ancient typewriter and I set up a new tab (page) marked fungi and tried to copy and paste my list of fungi into the newly named “Biological Records” spreadsheet – oooh posh! – where it promptly fragmented and after a bit of blokey random key pressing disappeared altogether. A frantic reverse ferret move revived the patient but everything was in the wrong columns. It dawned on me that I was in for an agonising long haul – studying things that I really don’t like in order to study better the things that interest me most. No pixie dust, just slog and brain fog like learning to solve differential equations in school.

Dodder – Cousin Bronwyn from West Wales beasting the Gorse.

Self doubt closely resembles Dodder and its cousin in the photo at the top, Lesser Dodder. It coils around your brain and sucks it dry; replacing the creative juices with dust. Like Restharrow – a different tangle of a plant that does what it says on the tin and stops a horse-drawn harrow in its tracks. It’s the curse of all self-taught people to defer instinctively to the careless wisdom of those who had an academic career in gnats’ navels and who believe their qualifications trump the more common muddy boots kind of knowledge gained by the hoi polloi. [That should properly read ….. ‘gained by hoi polloi’ because hoi is the definite article in Greek, but if I wrote it that way I’d be denounced as a pedant]. And so we, the great unwashed, struggle with the pronunciation of long binomial names like Pseudoperonospora humuli and remain silent rather than have a go at it. The trick is to put the stress on the third syllable before the last and say it with conviction. The political theorist and philosopher Gramsci called people like us “organic intellectuals”. It’s a term I’m proud to embrace because it puts me in the company of the miners and railway workers, the millers and machinists and labourers who taught themselves to the highest levels and founded institutes and even invented the health services, ambulance clubs, cooperatives and friendly societies that protected their communities from hardship and exploitation by hard-nosed industrialists, the parasitic human subspecies of Dodder.

After a couple of hours trying to get my head around the entirely unfamiliar vocabulary of computer spreadsheets I didn’t just feel depressed, I felt stupid. I’d still got a mountain of identifications to do with no prospect of getting everything done before the new season kicks off in earnest. But then Madame suggested a walk and that lifted the mood. It’s been very cold with icy winds for days, but there’s been abundant sunshine and we’ve had some lovely walks along the river. Slowly the precious feeling of optimism and hope warmed our fingers and toes and we began to talk about journeys waiting to be made. I will get the spreadsheet working, write my million words and we will make our planned travels around the galleries and churches of Wales to see the cruelly unacknowledged glories of Welsh art. We will hunt for birds and plants, moths and butterflies as if we were in the Amazon jungle, and we’ll dip our feet in the sea again like we did when we were teenagers in awe of the turquoise sea and dracaenas of Falmouth.

Too old for that sort of malarkey? My dears, you have no idea!

Who knew that the world is so noisy?

Hazel catkins on the riverside path

Well, this is a new one! At last, yesterday I had my new hearing aids fitted after a six month wait. I mentioned the long wait to the audiologist at the hospital and she looked so troubled I immediately changed the subject. Poor things, they must have had a battering from angry patients. These new ones are a bit of a game changer because they’re bluetooth capable and they’ve also got some kind of wizardry built in that generates faint white noise which subdues the tinnitus noises. They’re caused by the brain which doesn’t like the silence of deafness so it generates some very unappealing whistling sounds to compensate. I think the hearing aids, by making sure that it’s never silent, stop the brain having to fill in the gap. Nature abhors a vacuum even when it’s between your ears.

Anyway, she also said that although it would be uncomfortable it was better to wear them continually so that the brain would get used to the change in sounds faster. I now know what she meant. We walked down Green Park road yesterday and the high frequency noise of passing car tyres was almost unbearable. By the evening I was completely exhausted by beeping kettles and roaring washing machine and so (as you do) I asked Google Gemini whether the tiredness was a known side effect of new hearing aids. And it seems that it’s well known enough to have a name – “listening fatigue” which results from the brain – which even on a quiet day burns 20% of your energy – desperately trying to catch up with this new sound environment. The upside is that I can now (with some help from my friend Kate) listen to music, take phone calls and turn off the subtitles on the telly while reducing the volume. Our neighbours will be rejoicing . My dad used to have the telly on so loud you could hear it halfway down the road.

When, last January I had a routine blood test I had no idea what a storm of hospital appointments and procedures would be unleashed. I am now grimly familiar with the Royal United Hospital and hope – in the nicest possible way – that after one last appointment with the glaucoma clinic in January and one more blood test, we’ll be able to go our separate ways; but I can’t leave without saying how great they’ve been and how grateful I am that the many overseas nurses and doctors who helped to find out what was really wrong were prepared to stay here and keep the NHS running in spite of the racist abuse they have to put up with. In the end it turned out to be a pretty non-lethal and treatable combination of troubles and I’m glad to say that the engine is now running smoothly again; my appetite is returning along with a lovely touch of optimism. Madame too is practically back to normal after her knee replacement and the campervan is back on the road with a reconditioned engine, new clutch, cambelt and alternator so 2026 is filled with the promise of new adventures. In a month’s time we’ll be back in Cornwall armed with the trailcam and moth trap. Can’t wait.

On an equally celebratory note, I managed to fulfil two of the three resolutions by going back through all the old jumble of photos, stored – shoe-box style and beyond reach. I managed to turn the 22,000 photos into 1000 records and I identified 500 species of plants growing in the places we visited. The only resolution I didn’t meet was to complete a million words on this blog – but I’m only 8000 words short and they’ll be written before we go down to Cornwall and start a new set of lists; this time including moths. I’ve started the fungus records as well, so there will be hours of head scratching to look forward to.

2025 was the year in which we decided to give up the allotment and then changed our minds when I was well enough to walk up to the track without stopping three times. So now we’re ready for whatever the climate crisis throws at us next season. As always the point of growth is the place of injury and we’ve learned a great deal about gardening through extreme weather and even managed some decent crops right at the end of September. The apple crop was magnificent and we’ve still got a few fresh allotment apples in store.

At home the Pensions Board have finally begun to plan how they’re going to deal with the black mould in our flat – it’s only ten years after all since we first complained, and the Church of England never rushes a decision when it can be kicked into the long grass for a decade.

So that’s it. The Potwell Inn is signing off for 2025 but the doors will probably be open again tomorrow. I suppose someone will call last orders at some point, but for now we seem to have escaped, Bon Voyage mes amis!

Christmas at the Potwell Inn

Mistletoe

Geoffrey Grigson lists so many myths, folklore fragments and healing properties for mistletoe that after the second dozen I gave up counting them. Many of them were concerned with fertility, citing the similarity between mistletoe berries and what he coyly calls the male part. I’ve tried to verify that by looking at photos (of plants, of course) but I don’t really get that one; unless he had some uniquely blessed male friends with an extra testicle for luck! However if mistletoe gives license for a kiss I’m all in favour as long as it’s between consenting friends. Never inflame a temptation unless you’re free to yield to it has always been my motto.

Grigson, whose book “The Englishman’s Flora” lives on my desk, wasn’t writing a botanical textbook. The reason his book is so useful is because it’s a work of anthropology; examining how how and why plants have been used in the past – which often also explains how or why they got their names. Just one example is Figwort – which doesn’t make much sense until you look at the tight purple rinsed flower and then discover that “fig” was one of many ways of describing piles and so it was thought (via the doctrine of signatures) that it would cure that very common and uncomfortable condition.

Anyway, enough of that! Christmas has come and still lingers like a houseguest with a toothbrush for a few more days before we all secretly breathe a sigh of relief and get on with our boring and predictable lives. The Potwell Inn, as always, was especially busy with overnight guests; some of them sons. Partners and children were visited and hugged on Boxing day. It’s conventional for clergy (and retired ones like me) to moan about the workload, and it’s true; Christmas was always hard going with up to 20 carol services. Christmas Eve was particularly heavy going with services at 8.00am, 10.00am 4.00pm and 11.30pm followed by no more than four hours sleep and then four more in the morning. Then, because I was constantly up and around until 3.00am and then again at 7.00am , it always fell to me to attend to the turkey, cook gammon and feed the five thousand between services until I finally got home, tyres smoking from roaring around narrow country lanes and share a bottle of celebratory champagne after which I would finish cooking dinner rather drunkenly, discover I wasn’t really hungry any more and fall asleep.

Christmas cooking can’t be fully described without talking as Geoffrey Grigson did with a form of culinary anthropology in mind. Coincidentally – or perhaps importantly, Geoffrey the poet was married to Jane Grigson the cookery writer who did understand that there was more to Christmas cooking than a few ingredients. Cooking is regional, familial, historical and associated with powerful spiritual connections because Christmas, solstice, yule and so on are all associated with a key moment in the calendar – the slow return of longer days. Farm workers, for instance, were often laid off in the weeks surrounding winter solstice and so Plough Monday – the day the plough was brought into Christian churches to be blessed; signifies that turning point in the agricultural year.

Every year the bookshops are flooded with Christmas recipe books, and yet – apart from a few novel bells and whistles – most of them miss the point altogether. Very few food writers have explored the deep connection between the recipes and the cultures that brought them into being. Cooking is an important aspect of anthropology and very few food writers have grasped that essential fact. Cooks will, for instance, try to tweak the Christmas pudding with a novel ingredient or two and describe the dish as “essential” without even attempting to answer the question “why is that?” One of the few, and one of my favourite food writers is Patience Gray. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about another of my favourite food writers who also managed to unite the recipe with a sense of the history and culture of a place; she was called MFK Fisher, an American writer who wrote some fine books about French cookery traditions. I’ve long thought that there must be some kind of genealogy for cookery writers and I even had a bash at creating one a couple of years ago. The piece I wrote is called “About a Book” and you can easily reach it with the linked title here. The titles of all the books and their writers are all in that incomplete list. These writers, and especially Patience Gray who lived much of her life in Puglia, penetrated the deep roots of the cultures they were writing about. Their books would still have been an inspiration without a single recipe – although I’m so glad they left their accounts. Modern cookbooks with their rich and unctuous photographs and endless hybrid ingredients make me feel queasy.

This year I missed my parishes more than ever before. Ten years into retirement we’ve finally reset our lives and I’m able to look back with a degree of detachment and write that with a few exceptions I loved every moment. I never saw myself as a great theologian – I was far too given to exploring heretical ideas for that. Real faith, it seems to me should bear a close resemblance to Odysseus’ wife Penelope weaving, or rather not weaving the burial shroud for her father Laertes in the Odyssey. If it’s not unpicked regularly, you’ll risk being hooked up with a dud, or a foolish or even a sociopathic religious sect. But with my background in community arts, I knew from the outset that the skill set needed for a full church is pretty much the same as it is for a full pub, and my preaching was always inspired and inflected by everyday conversations, about ordinary things with people I’d grown to love, however annoying they could sometimes be. Leaving them was a profound bereavement. Perhaps the Potwell Inn was the consolation I needed.

There is, of course, a strongly ritualistic element in Christmas cooking; much of it leaning on family memories of the past. For years we mentioned the possibility to our three grown-up sons that we might change the Christmas day menu. They were invariably horrified at the thought and so it was turkey every year until lockdown when I cooked Mexican just for Madame and me. It felt very naughty! Aside from that there are a slew of memories that we honour in the weeks preceding Christmas. Making Christmas cake and Christmas puddings demands the making of wishes, and thankfully we no longer have to lift the steaming puddings out of the wash boiler with a bleached white copper stick hooked into a looped knot in old torn sheets. These days we use the pressure cooker which still retains at least some of the drama.

On Christmas Eve I cook a piece of gammon; sometimes roasted in the oven and sometimes poached in cider, always flavoured with cloves, peppercorns, bay, star anise and sage. The leftover stock or meat juices are kept for lentil soup. That’s supper and breakfast in one. Then the stuffings are prepared echoing with memories of Elizabeth David; the giblets poached with a few root veg to complement the gravy and all set out in the cold ready for the morning. On Christmas morning the bird is stuffed, the pigs in blankets rolled in bacon painted with mustard and the steam begins to run in rivulets down the windows. Then there is roasting, basting and prodding and poking with the thermometer until we are all agreed that the bird is cooked and the roasties crisp. Gluttony follows as night follows day and then the blazing Christmas pud and for those with elasticated bellies, sherry trifle. Christmas dinner is liturgical; we know it’s not real life but for a few blissful hours we can pretend it is.

The sherry trifle is made from a recipe given to me by Gill, an old friend, many years ago and which has been riveted on to the menu for decades. The biggest problem is sourcing the crystallised angelica without which it just doesn’t look right. The last time I found any (in Penzance) I bought the whole stock, so now I need to begin the search again. Oh and cheap glacé cherries are dyed with a kind of red stain that leaches quickly into the whipped cream spoils it.

Then on Boxing Day inevitably cold turkey with bubble and squeak after which we strip the remaining meat from the bones and make about a gallon of stock, some of which we use as broth the next day, and the rest of which is reduced and frozen in cubes for later.

So that’s the menu for our lump standard Christmas dinner, but there’s another ingredient which carries even more emotional baggage, because on Boxing Day especially we eat pickles.

There are no eat-by dates on pickles and chutneys at the Potwell Inn. we open them up and if they’re not sporting a flora of moulds we taste them and they’re almost always OK. Chutneys can be awfully raw at the beginning but they greatly improve with age, and I can always remember each batch in the making. Years ago I bought a gross of honey jars with tin lids which will corrode pretty soon when in contact with vinegar fumes so we’ve learned to keep the honey jars for jams, jellies and marmalade and keep pickles and chutneys in Kilner jars with rubber seals. We grow our own red and white currants on the allotment; alongside beans, cucumbers, chillies, carrots, courgettes. Plums and damsons come from our friends in Severnside, along with medlars which we blet for two or three weeks until they’ve gone soft. The bletting, brining and cooking can take ages but once finished and bottled they’ll keep for years and in the autumn, when the cupboards are full, they lend a feeling of continuity and security as well as adding unique flavours to a lunch of bread and cheese. With this kind of food we dine with our ancestors. We inherited the thriftiness of our parents who lived through shortages and it’s heartbreaking to think that future generations may miss that strange comfort of making leftovers taste lovely.

So time now for me to cook supper – and meanwhile we at the Potwell Inn wish all our friends big hugs and restrained kisses and to all our readers a very happy Christmas and New Year.

I had a visitation last night from Dabberlocks and Furbelow

The dream

I like to think of Dabberlocks and Furbelow as invisible friends; but in reality, as solicitors for my superego for my whole life, they’ve hinted, adjudicated and occasionally forbidden my wilder flights of fancy. Occasionally they’ll issue a non-disclosure order on one of my ideas but mainly they just sit in silence and I know what’s required. I call it censorship but they refer to it as discretion and normally they win.

The visitations come in occasional dreams and their names and faces are never visible to me but I always know they mean business even if their language is completely opaque and I struggle to understand what they’re driving at. Once I had a dream about a very large and menacing dog clutching a beautiful ruby in its teeth which I think I was supposed to remove. on Saturday night I had another dream in which the words were said – “you can’t argue with a blackthorn” in the context of winter flowering plants. It usually takes a lot of imagination to turn the key in the lock but this one immediately brought to mind a long abandoned project about a character I’d invented called Barnacle. I wrote a kind of CV down for him at the time, along with a quite detailed description of his appearance. Beard, huge greatcoat with deep pockets and that kind of thing. But as soon as I recalled the word “blackthorn” I knew that he would have carried a blackthorn stick representing both the peaceful rambler and the belligerent cudgel known in Ireland as a shillelagh. Two of his multiple temperaments in a single wintry stick that flowered like snow in the hedges in the worst and coldest season of the year.

Then I had him. I’d kept him secret for twenty years and it was time to let him out.

I learned something unforgettable from Sister Enid many years ago, and it helped me to weave some random threads into a thick cloth.The first time I met her was on a Catholic retreat. This was no pious weekend, though, because the La Retraite house in Bristol was, a beacon of radical and practical faith. I took part in a number of retreats there – they were pioneers in bringing Myers Briggs to the UK – but on that particular occasion there was something else going on. The point here is not so much what went on, but the fact that until 48 hours in, Sister Enid didn’t speak a word. She sat in the corner silently and, being young and arrogant, I assumed that she was an ancient, probably half senile sister who had been propped up in the room for a bit of company. We were a strange mix, but amongst the retreatants were a group of sisters from another house who were experiencing – let’s say – interpersonal difficulties. There was something bad eating away at them. 

Anyway, the retreat went on and we talked a bit; shared a bit and did some challenging exercises in small groups and in full sessions. In the last plenary, Sister Enid finally spoke. She had watched and listened from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon – the daft old lady in the corner – and then finally and without notes, she accomplished the most forensic examination of a group’s dynamics I’ve ever witnessed. I learned two important things that weekend. Firstly, never again to stereotype and then dismiss another human being because they were old; and secondly that watching, listening and paying minute attention is infinitely more humane and useful to a writer than spouting smartass ideas and showing off. 

I even invented – conceived – a character who embodied that lesson. The name, I’m afraid, was invented long before the children’s TV programme called the Octonauts so I must ask that you banish any thoughts of the character of the bear in the TV films. My Captain Barnacle – without the final ‘s’ – is a darker character and – to be honest – he’s part of an alter ego that I created for myself twenty years ago.  Here’s the CV I wrote for him – or perhaps it was me all along.:  

A wintry story at Christmas

At the edge of the River Severn in the month of December you might stand in the freezing cold one night, with the moon sitting low in the sky and the wind rattling down over your shoulder from the Northeast, driving the clouds across the sky like sea foam.  And if you stand until your fingers turn white and brittle and wait and wait as the tide flows and foxes go about their business, you might wonder at the sheer size of the sky above your head.  And you might, as you scan the sky, think to yourself – “this is the point in the film where the geese fly over, honking, and my blood freezes” – you might also begin to see the millions of stars above your head and among them you might notice the constellation of Orion with his sword and his belt.  And you might also think to yourself that this dark sky reminds you a bit of your Dad’s huge black overcoat then you wouldn’t be far out.

And imagine if you could search in his deep black pockets for sweets, and breathe in the familiar sharp smell of his armpits, and the smell of the bus, and the smell of the rain and the pub and you would feel very safe indeed perhaps and you would know that asking whether such a being as Captain Barnacle exists is a silly question.  When you have seen the stars that line his greatcoat stretched over your head in the dead of night, then you just know it, and the teachers, pharisees, inquisitors and pedants as usual, know nothing. 

As to the facts, there’s not a lot to be said.  He’s a weaver of meanings, like an angel or possibly the weaver of a unique form of cloth.    Some people have argued that there may be a hierarchy of Barnacles and such a thing may be as true as any other thing.  What I know for a fact is that he lives on a hill near a seaside town – hence the name and rank – and he drives a yellow Morris 1000 van with stars and a crescent moon hand painted on the side, and he has a more or less scandalous and very intermittent liaison with “Astral” who is an “International Clairvoyante” and whose visions regularly transcend the parish boundary. 

 It’s said he spends the day at a huge loom in a wooden shack, and where he weaves a sky cloth from fragments he has harvested during his journeys.  Anything from a ship’s manifest to a small advertisement could be woven.  A tiny piece of conversation blown in the wind is not too small to escape his attention.  He might be arrested by the arching of an eyebrow or the faint flush of the skin in a chance meeting between two people who do not yet know that they are lovers.  A dog’s bark, a small joke or even a road sign might inflame him.  A particular favourite of his are lists and catalogues which can easily be unravelled and used again.  Memories, sounds and smells are the warp and weft of the cloth and if he can lay his hands on the glint of the sea he can weave it in judiciously so as to bring the whole fabric to perfection. The cloth which he weaves descends only at night which is why you can’t see it in the day time.

The promiscuity of his means is a source of continual irritation to the town, and especially to the deacons of the local church who, being both strict and particular as well as Baptist, have only the one story which is completely threadbare. 

This last factor may be the origin of their assertion that “Captain Barnacle is a creature of the night” – a phrase that has a peculiar resonance for parish councillors and deacons.  However it may be that the simple fact that he is, in reality,  out and about more obviously during the night, is enough to remove the inverted commas and turn the criticism into an observation.

Some refining of the idea might help.  Captain Barnacle is especially a creature of the warm summer night.  On such a night, the sea-town is held in the air by the force of dreams of faded seawashed driftwood spars; frames; orange-peel;

Delabole slate; terracotta tiles; Paynes grey skies, windworn rocks; sea worn pebbles; scrubbed sand; lichens; quoits and dracaenas as various as silks in a cabinet or an artists’ colour chart.   Then, as the sun sets and the pasty shops clean down their shelves, the soft warmth of night insinuates its seductive aromas around the harbour.  When the scent of hot tarmac, wallflowers, fish and chips, cigarette  smoke and stale beer hang in the salt air like pheromones to the young men and women gathered like moths beneath coloured lights . When Pasties, suntan oil and peeling shutters shriven by the summer heat gift their perfumes to the sky as it turns from pale blue to indigo. When the people refuse the cadence of night and day and they try to stretch the day as if they could hold the tide at the rim of the horizon by sheer effort of will.  Then Captain Barnacle will leave home and drive down the winding road through the town. 

Captain Barnacle is also a creature of the winter night, of the harvest night, of the night of mourning.  He is both Captain of the Feast and solitary figure at the graveside.  “Amen to that!” he cries, and the deacons and the parish councillors murmur damp threats and plan horrible revenge. They will whip him with scorpions, they say, and Elder Bell keeps a whole nest of them behind the shop where he keeps the flick knives and condoms for the local lads.

Truth to tell, I think Captain Barnacle is a bit frightening.  The smell of his armpits and the acrid greatcoat speak of other adventures and happenings that aren’t so good.  In fact they’re everything the deacons say.  Sometimes he puts his hands deep down into his greatcoat pockets and you can hear things scurrying around in there. 

 Some say that the Captain is exceedingly old, even as old as Adam himself and others maintain that he drifted into town in the nineteen sixties and never left.  He might be some kind of extraordinary deity or he might be a beach-bum entrepreneur. 

The beard is a nice thought.  Nothing goes with a greatcoat like a beard, and a pipe.  But this beard is different;  so dense you could not hack your way through it with the sharpest billhook.  A beard to occlude the sky and the clouds.  A beard full of thorns and small nesting birds and fugitives hiding from justice.  A beard full of things you tried to say and couldn’t.  A grey beard with a golden stain that might come from poems spoken out loud or from roll-ups. It is impossible to imagine him without one and so I will give him one without fear of being accused of not really knowing him at all – and the length of his hair? Flowing, naturally, and long …. somewhat wavy and a tad greasy for some tastes.

And his stick? Why of course it’s a blackthorn shillelagh. Dark with age and cured for a year in a dung heap wrapped in oiled cloth to make it harder and more resilient and made by a man called Rex who’d scoured the hedges near the riverside for exactly the right conjunction of root (for handle) and shaft; donned his thickest gloves against the thorns and sawn it off – unique and precious; polished it to a glow and weighted it with lead so that it balanced at exactly one third of the way down where – if needs be – Captain Barnacle would hold it in order to administer stern correction if the deacons came after him on the heath, in the dark.

There must be more!