Category: Eudaimonia – flourishing

Time’s running out

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A friend in Australia wrote today about the situation in Tamborine Mountain, South East Queensland. Here’s what she wrote:

The water situation is now getting desperate. Families are completely running out of water, and having to wait weeks while the only local supplier tries to keep up with demand.  Meanwhile, multiple commercial extractors continue to take millions of litres of water to fill plastic bottles.  The creeks are dry and the trees are suffering …….

It’s a scary example of the global phenomenon we’ve come to describe as the climate catastrophe.  But of course the example says something else which is, or should be, equally challenging, because the global climate catastrophe and the global economic structure aren’t two problems, but one. The uncontrolled commercial extraction of water; the drought which is causing widespread suffering, the uncontrollable fires, the degradation of the environment and the destruction of forests, are symptoms of a single problem – I could go on, but I know there’s no need for me to write it because every single person who reads it will understand – it makes us feel sick with anxiety or overwhelmed with anger or at its worst, cynicism.

There’s a reason I don’t write much about UK politics.  The fact is there are no easy answers because we are living in a time of what Thomas Kuhn called ‘paradigm shift’. Anyone who claims to know what life will be like in 2050 is almost by definition a charlatan. It feels as if the ship has sunk already, and we’re in the water arguing about which lifebelt to grab hold of and which of our fellow passengers knows how to pilot the lifeboats, now the crew are all drunk after raiding the stores.

Do you remember the political fashion, so beloved by New Labour, of ‘evidence based policies’?  Loved, that is, until the evidence started to show that things were going to hell in a handcart because the patient was fundamentally sick, and a few paid ads saying that ‘everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ was not selling well in the derelict mining towns of the North East. This is the most terrible and heart wrenching mess and it’s all connected in a rat’s nest of trans-national  greed.

However we have the opportunity in the UK this week to turn protests into policy. Saving the earth from climate catastrophe begins with challenging an extractive economy that destroys the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we need to eat. It throws people across the world into slavery and poverty in the name of international trade, and blithely dismisses mass extinctions – including even the human race. When I walk around the grand Georgian crescents of Bath, built on slave money, and see the same people in power, I know that nothing’s changed, and I know that unless we seize the opportunity nothing will change.

There is no area of our lives that hasn’t been disfigured by so-called austerity, whether it’s health care, pensions, social care, education, cultural development, employment protection, environmental policy, transport – you name it.  So I’m voting for change, real change. I want to be able to teach my grandchildren their plants and butterflies in the knowledge that they’ll still be there when they’re my age. I want our sons to move out of squalid rentals into properly built houses and I want them to feel secure in their work without facing arbitrary contract changes. Selfishly, I’d like for us to be able to look to a future in old age without fear, and to walk down the street and hear ten languages spoken and a dozen cultures celebrated openly.  I’d like to be able to write about the allotment without the lurking fear that the council will sell the land off to another property developer, and if that meant paying a few quid more in tax I’d be happy to oblige as long as the offshore muggers paid theirs too. 

There isn’t an option out there to allow us to ignore the climate catastrophe in the hope of building some new technology to purge our sins and let us carry on as before. Our electoral system is rigged against us in the name of stability – i.e. more hardship – and so this coming Thursday is possibly the only opportunity we’ll have to vote for change; paradigm change, and in the US – your chance will come next year. We already know they’re scared, from the tide of promoted lies that flood like effluent into our minds every day.

I had a radio producer once whose recorded message said “you know what to do, so do it!” Let’s do it then.

 

Everyday sacred

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Writing about baking bread the other day I was casting around for a way of expressing just how important ordinary actions and objects can be. I’ve written in the past about the ‘ordinary’ and I’ve no doubt I’ll keep coming back to it. Ordinary is a word inflected by its use by the church to describe the authority of regularity, of obedience, of order, but in  institutional hands it came to mean repetitiveness, blind obedience and hierarchy. Sometimes it’s possible to blow the dust off an old word and restore it to its full meaning, but maybe ‘ordinary’ has been taken to the charity shop once too often and so it just means ‘a bit meh’.

So my loaf of bread, ordinary though it is to me, because it embodies a whole network of responsibilities and regularities – and great beauty too, aside from its utility as a shared food – ‘ordinary’ doesn’t quite stretch to it.  So I tried another word. ‘everyday’.   Everyday bread perhaps, for some people, conjures up a faint memory of ‘daily bread’. The word stuck in my mind and although I’ve tried writing on a number of other subjects I keep coming back to the idea of ‘everyday sacred’.

I’m really worried about using these kind of words because they’ve been so hijacked and starved by by their association with organised religion with which I’ve had a long relationship in the past.  But that leaves me with a problem because if ‘spirituality’, ‘sacred’, and all their associated concepts are put beyond reach by the institutions that hold the concession at the moment, we have to start from scratch in describing what for many of us is a deeply felt connection with the earth, and with one another, that transcends the ‘selfish gene’ nonsense peddled by Old Testament atheists like Richard Dawkins.

I no longer have a belief in the supernatural.  I dreamed about losing it and then it just happened one day as I stood watching the River Severn in flood, and I saw it float away in the fierce water.  It wasn’t at all dramatic; I wasn’t as much ‘losing my faith’ as being set free to find it again in another place, free of the rigidity and dogma. I’ve never spoken about this before and it may come as a bit of a shock to some of my friends so I’ll have to pace up and down  a bit before I press the ‘publish’ button, but there we are – it’s a relief to have written it.

So now I can write about everyday sacred without any ambiguity about my intentions. This blog isn’t about selling anything it’s about being human – delightfully, stupidly and increasingly decrepitly human.  When I’m in the kitchen making bread I feel connected.  When I’m on the allotment I feel it too.  On my way through the park today I stood face to face with a pair of long tailed tits in the hedge who seemed as curious about me as I was about them, and the urge to thank somebody, something, surged inside me.

Everyday sacred is that sense of gratitude because the earth provides so much that we need. The photo is of a sketch I made of a garlic bulb – this was a more successful one, I did dozens of others that turned out like schoolboy phallic graffiti – it’s hard to get it right. Knowing that it’s so good for us to eat and knowing something about the quite amazing molecular transformations that go on within garlic, within so many plants whose secondary metabolites can cure our diseases and put us back together again – that induces the same sense of the everyday sacred.  The hawthorn – we called it ‘bread and cheese’ as children and ate the leaves when they were new and not full of tannin – hawthorn has an outrageous array of natural gifts to offer.

So the Potwell Inn is for: dancing, singing, making music, eating together, telling jokes, falling in love, breaking the rules, growing our food and listening to each others troubles; healing, challenging and forgiving – these are the everyday sacred, and I say to the churches – “thank you for looking after the ball for so long,  but please can we have it back now.”

Mindfulness makes better bread (and doctors)

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Mornings are my  time. I love pottering around in the kitchen and, of course, it’s the time for kneading the sourdough. Over the years I’ve learned a lot about making bread and one hard lesson, when I was new to the game, was to leave things alone.  I was always prodding, poking and fiddling about with the dough at the time when it most needed leaving alone. But paradoxically I wasn’t paying the kind of minute attention to it at the right time either.

Recipes are essential, but they’re only the start – because it seems every batch of flour can be subtly different from the last in the amount of water it will need to reach the right consistency. So my recipe suggests adding 300g flour to the batter before kneading. In reality it might need anywhere between 320g and 360g to be right for my ‘everyday’ loaf. How I arrive at the exact amount is by trial and error.  300g will give a basic but very sticky mix, and for the first couple of loaves from a new batch I just add flour as I knead.  As time goes on I’ve got a pretty good idea how much I’ll need – today it was 340g, which was spot-on. Clearly different brands of flour can make an even bigger difference.

Frustrating as it may seem, the only way is to gain more experience – it takes time and attention to do it. In my kitchen I judge the consistency of the dough by the way it sticks to the wooden table. If I’m constantly scraping the table it’s too slack. If it’s not sticking at all it’s too firm – you’ll know that anyway because it’s so hard to knead. It’s just right when I stretch the dough, pushing it forwards with the heel of my right hand, while the fingers of the left hand are resting on the back of the dough, ready to make a quarter turn before starting again. The combination of light fingers and just the right adhesion makes the job easy. Too sloppy a dough will stick to the banneton and turn out like a pancake – all crust and no crumb. Too stiff a dough will turn out cleanly but it will have a too dense a crumb. The right consistency will (just) turn out without sticking, and rise triumphantly, the bubbles not being held in by the dough. As a drystone waller I once knew would say to customers who complained about the price – “It’s a pound for the stone and ninety nine pounds for knowing what to do with it!”

Every stage of the baking process prospers when it’s accompanied by minute attention to detail. As any student of Tai Chi or Chinese painting would tell you, true spontaneity springs from constant practice. I love the story of Charlie Parker being blown off the stage by a bunch of far more experienced jazz players when he was sixteen and full of his own importance. They just kept of changing key until ran out  of steam.  His response was to go out and practice until – much later – he was able to go back on stage and blow them off.

Time, patience, practice and multi-sensory attentiveness are prerequisites for good baking and – come to think of it – good medicine as well. I’ve had a minor heart problem for years and I kept going back to the doctors who would do an ECG and tell me that nothing was wrong. They looked at their data – never at me – and told me that it said I wasn’t ill. Over a period of years I never spent more than 10 minutes in the surgery and rarely had any eye contact at all with a doctor.  When we moved here I was advised by a friend to sign up with a practice that trained GP’s because the trainees were often terrifyingly up to date (my friend was a trainer herself). They also get 20 minutes for their appointments rather than 10.  So when it happened again I made an appointment and was assigned to a trainee. 20 minutes later he’d listened to me, he’d arranged for some monitoring via the local hospital and reviewed all my meds. During the 24 hour monitoring period I had four episodes that could have resulted in a heart attack or stroke – and I’d been having them at that rate for years. The technician who looked at the data said that she was always seeing people like me because my problem doesn’t show up on a straightforward ECG. Now I’m taking medication the risk is greatly reduced – just because that inexperienced trainee took time, stepped away from the preconceptions and listened intently to me. Would I prefer a more naturally based regime? – of course, and I’ll do my best to move sensibly in that direction, but for now it’s the pills.

So here’s a thought.  While we agitate constantly for new, expensive technology based medicine, would there be any mileage in training so many more GP’s that they had time to spend half an hour getting to know the big picture of the patients’ lives? That extra ten minutes may have saved mine and given me the time to learn more about making bread. I love the NHS and I feel for the overloaded GP’s who know they’re not giving what they’re capable of because they need more funding. And they also need a new kind of training that develops those scary skills like attentiveness, empathy and appreciation for the whole person ….. oh and let’s have a bit less hostility to four millennia of good old human experience.

 

A smelly discovery at the botanical gardens

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Maidenhair Tree – Ginkgo biloba

But first, writing this is pure heaven because – thanks to a surprise gift from our son – I’ve finally migrated out of the Apple empire into the equally dubious but far more joined-up empire of Android. It was a tremendous gift because I was expecting a small tablet and when I opened the box it turned out to be a full-on laptop, all of which meant that with a bit of jiggery pokery, a few face to face tutorials from him, and a whole lot of automatic stuff the whole system works brilliantly. Just to recap I’d already inherited his previous Google Pixel phone a couple of weeks ago and this weekend, with the new laptop, I moved the last few files across and I no longer had to wait 25 minutes for my ancient MacBook to boot up and wheeze its way to some kind of functionality. I’m overjoyed at the knowledge that I can just get on with writing and not have to spend hours cleaning the system because the 4Gb RAM filled up with junk. I can even look at all the photos in the library without having to stop for a coffee in the middle of  a session. My ancient dread at changing operating systems turned out to be a folk tale put about by Apple. A couple of days offline was all it took. The Potwell Inn carrier pigeons and the old smoke signal machine have been retired to the outdoor privvy.

But back to today and, system up and running, we all went for  a walk up to the Botanical Gardens. The gardens have lots of good stuff in them but with constant budget cutbacks it’s a largely voluntary effort these days, and bits of the gardens are a bit rough round the edges.  However we had great fun using the Google Lens features on our phones to identify some of the plants and bushes in flower – it’s surprisingly accurate, quite as fast as some of the paid-for apps I’ve used in the past and well worth trying out, if only to narrow down the choices before making a formal ID using a key. We didn’t need to look for the Ginkgo because there was a nice big label on the tree.

There was no problem, then, in identifying the tree but the most interesting thing was the smell of the fruits rotting on the ground. I really didn’t know that they smelt so bad until we walked through the gate and T said “ugh – what’s that smell?” What indeed? A  quick check and we were offered rancid butter and vomit as possible descriptions.  I’d say dog poo and dead sheep came into it as well. For a plant with such powerful healing qualities it certainly does its bit to repel visitors. Fortunately the leaves were well beyond being worth saving and we’ve no means of extracting oil from the single seed inside the fruits, and so we escaped with a little more knowledge but no further need for dealing with the stink. The tree was right next to the entrance and it wasn’t hard to see other visitors taking surreptitious looks at the rest of us to see who’d stepped in something.

Late autumn and winter’s a funny time.  Everything feels as if it’s shutting down, but if you have a hunt around there are lovely things to be found.  The purple berries of the Callicarpa bodinieri were lovely, and the Verbena brasiliensis too was showing off just a bit. But I’m a sucker even for drifts of dead plants, and the birds in the area must be able to take advantage of the seed heads as a food source. 

As the solstice gets closer I get just an occasional insight into the significance of this season. As a sunshine loving activist I’m inclined to get fretful if I can’t get out on to the ground, and yet dealing with dearth and plenty, feast and famine, is fundamental to our human-ness. The earth is a complex, dynamic and interrelated system that has its own idea of what constitutes good practice. An annual season of reflection and contemplation is essential for our welfare. Screaming at an empty supermarket shelf because something we want isn’t there, is a sign that we need to get out more – not find a way of squeezing another crop out of the exhausted earth. So bring it on – the solstice will soon be here.

Mexican fleabane bids for world domination

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I am absolutely full of admiration for this little plant. Three years ago someone further up the street planted some in a container and ever since then it’s made a slow march towards us, colonising every spare crack in the pavement. It’s tough, that’s for sure – forget anything the books say – it’s enjoyed relentless heat during the summer on the south facing terrace outside, and after the first hard frost I popped downstairs to see how it was and, as you can see, it’s still going strong. Every summer our caretaker, in her relentless pursuit of a sterile landscape, douses it in Roundup despite our protestations.  The man from the council – if he’s got a minute – hoes it off too and the dear old fleabane shrugs its shoulders in a planty sort of way and gets on with its long march to the western seas. Interestingly, its cousin the Canadian fleabane keeled over after the frost – which seemed counterintuitive, but then, plants don’t read textbooks.

Meanwhile the allotment is in winter mode.  Apart from the turnips, celery, celeriac,  beetroot, spinach  – actually I’ll take back what I just wrote – what I should have said was that much of the allotment is in winter mode. In truth the early purple sprouting is just beginning to push out little buds where the crop will soon appear. Every year we say it’s a waste of space because they take so long to grow, and every year we change our minds when we eat the spears.

We’re well into the winter truce, and while the allotment takes a deep breath and digests all the compost we’ve put on, Madame and me negotiate next year’s ideas. We’ve agreed (without rancour) that we’ll grow more cut flowers and increase the number and quantity of culinary herbs because they’re so expensive to buy. Whether I’ll get away with any more medicinal herbs remains to be seen but Calendula, lavender, thyme and hyssop will be there with many others in any case and most of the ‘wilder’ ones are great pollinators  – plus they’re beautiful.

Many of the typical ‘medicine chest’ herbs grow wild locally and could be foraged carefully without any adverse impact. I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing this – it’s not as if I’m a great consumer of herbal remedies, in fact I’m a bit scared of some of them, but they’re a part of the ‘gift’ of nature; deeply entrenched in our culture – especially our literary culture – and to know some of the properties of plants helps to foster a non-dualistic, non religious worldview.  That sound much grander than it’s meant to – when  looking at a plant becomes a kind of beholding, something happens at a level much deeper than the rational.  I suppose I could resort to that overused term spiritual, but I’d rather think of it as a deeper level of being human – no supernatural concepts are needed.

Anyway, the advantage of a bit more time is that it means a bit more time in the kitchen and the beginning of the annual war on black mould.  Living in a concrete building means learning some new skills and avoiding using the filthy smelling chemicals used for combating mould has been a priority.  But we’ve been experimenting with white vinegar which must work by changing the pH of the plaster.  Initial results look good and diluted vinegar is brilliant for cleaning the windows as well. Meanwhile it’s been bread, cakes, and pancake experiments for me.  The winter is a real change of gear, with abundant lectures, talks and exhibitions here in Bath.  Tonight we’re off to a book signing by Celia Paul, who has an exhibition on at the same time as her book is published and was  Lucian Freud’s muse.  I’m wondering how she’ll handle it because she’s reputed to be rather shy and not given to small talk. Her sister, Jane Williams, was my tutor for a while.

 

Ordinary – must clean the hob!

IMG_20191119_092759My mother was very good at the forensic gaze. This morning’s kitchen would have troubled her, I’m certain, but I didn’t even notice that it’s pretty filthy until I put it on the screen. That’s the way of things, I suppose – most of our interiors (mental as well as domestic) would look pretty grubby and a bit random if we were to examine them with the cold eye of a picture editor. But we don’t, and I took the photo to remind myself of the great joys of the ordinary over and against the set-piece strutting that we’d prefer to have you believe about us.

The kettle rarely comes off the hob.  The Potwell Inn, surprisingly perhaps, runs on tea.  Recently we’ve increased our repertore of tea – black tea in the mornings, green tea most of the day and chamomile tea at night.  Since we took a break from the booze we feel better, sleep better and – well – drink tea. The way I make porridge would annoy all purists, GP’s and food faddists – made, as it is, with full cream milk, salt, and eaten with a bit of sugar.  However it lasts all day and reduces fridge-raiding which tends to involve lumps of cheese, so I suppose – on balance – it’s largely neutral. Today the kefir was left sulking in the fridge because it was the coldest night of the season so far and we both fancied something hot.

The loaf of bread is my cover for the grubby hob.  It wasn’t taken out of the oven until late yesterday evening. It was one of those doughs that wasn’t quite right – a bit soft but not at all sticky; not sticky that is, until I came to tip it out of the banneton when it growled at me and refused to budge. After a little stand-off I finally dragged it out, but it left a substantial dollop of dough behind and the loaf itself was far too soft to slash in the usual way, so it had a homeopathic tickle with the knife and went into the oven.  I’ve discovered over the years that making bread needs a similar mindset to making raku pottery.  Letting things be seems to work best. However the whole process involved a good deal of escaping rice flour – which is usually the best for releasing the dough from the banneton – mess which I couldn’t be bothered to clear up apart from a cursory wipe with a cloth before bed.

The ordinary, the homely is the warp of the enterprise of being human and the experiences of the day are the weft.  Together they make cloth – in my case probably some sort of rough old drill and in yours, possibly, evanescent silk. I hacked a crust off the loaf this morning and it was lovely – it was individual; itself. Like Ryokan’s poetry.

Like Jacob, wresting a blessing from the moment

 

The two pictures don’t belong together geographically. The eyebright – Euphrasia officinalis agg was photographed in St Davids and the sea-wall was in Mousehole, Cornwall. Linked together (just about) by the Atlantic ocean which they shared, but opposites in almost every other respect; the one transitory and vulnerable and the other adamantine and massive. There’s one other thing that they share: they both made me stop and pay rapt attention to them.

Identifying flowers can be quite challenging when they’re very variable. The little “agg” after the Latin name means that there are in this case something like 30 recognised variants and/or 71 wild hybrids – they all look a bit like this apparently but how would I know? Even the magisterial Clive Stace makes it sound hard – it’s an eyebright and it’s very small and very beautiful and I’m resisting any temptation to enlarge on its healing properties except to say it seems that it’s still in use for its medicinal properties.

The harbour wall, equally could have been built in an almost infinite variety of configurations from the stone at hand.  That monster five-sided stone must have taken the combined strength of three, maybe four masons to lift into place, and it could have been laid with any of its sides at the base. Was it a collective decision?  Did the foreman say “it goes like this”, or was the culture of building so strong that they all just knew where it should go? The form, the pattern of both flower and wall are characteristic of a basic structure but capable of many variations, any of which seem, as I discover them, to be absolutely perfect. To use an analogy from jazz, there’s a pulse, a starting key, a sequence, an idea, and thereafter an emerging and embodied performance.

I’ve never thought of a plant or a wall as a performance before, but it’s an exciting and provocative thought.  And what about a moth or a cat or a daffodil?  Or to use a much simpler (because speeded up) example – what about a sudden parting of the clouds over the horizon as the sun sets?  Why is it that my response, so often, to the unexpected discovery of something lovely – is to cry out, to clap my hands as if I’d just heard the most brilliant improvisation.

That’s exactly the underlying idea from the title of John Parkinson’s 1640 book “Theatrum Botanicum – The Theatre of Plants”, reworked again by Richard Mabey’s 2015 book “Cabaret of Plants”. Plants, flowers and all of nature wrest from us an emotional response that goes way beyond our recognition of their usefulness. We give them names and use their names because in their performance they force us to go beyond any instrumental, reductive thoughts and into relationship with them. And the idea of treating our relationship with plants (or sea walls) as a kind of performance reminds us that performances are not complete without readers, listeners or viewers – and the better we are at those tasks, the greater, the more illuminating and powerful the performance can be.  I owe to A F Woodman, my much loved music teacher at secondary school, this phrase – “I know you can hear it Pole – but are you listening?!”

On a plain, grey day in November with nothing much going on, I’m flicking through my photos looking for inspiration. Nine times out of ten, my postings are initiated by a photograph – something that caught my eye, made me stop what I what I was doing at some point during the day.  But some days are unrelieved by those moments of illumination. Some days when everything seems flat and spare I have to wrest a blessing from the moment, hang in there. And today my consolation is in the eyebright I found at St Davids in the summer, and in contemplating that great granite sea-wall, shouldering off the waves tide after tide, storm after storm and still there as the first celandines peep through the snow – upcountry.

 

 

 

My stiff toe and other spelling mistakes

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Years ago I went to see our doctor with a painfully arthritic big toe.  He was a lovely man and probably didn’t much care for those situations where there was absolutely nothing he could do, and he said “It’s hallux rigidus”. I was a bit disappointed – not so much to be suffering from a ‘real’ disease with a name  – but because hallux rigidus is latin for “stiff toe”. And so I said – ” well I know that –  it’s why I came to see you” and it was clear that we were both trapped in our respective discomfort zones but speaking in different languages.

Latin is an incredibly useful language that the overwhelming majority of us don’t get to learn at school.  Unless you go to a public (US Private) school in the UK you’re very unlikely to know any. I didn’t get any Latin at all until I was almost forty and at theolological college, so although I’m familiar with Latin and Greek I’m a million miles away from any expertise, and that’s why I get cross when I feel Latin is being used to lock me out of the conversation. Latin binomial names can be incredibly useful for distinguishing between similar related plants – especially when getting them right really matters like, for instance in foraging when confusing sweet cicily with hemlock or hemlock water dropwort roots with wlld parsnips. But let’s be clear, it isn’t the latin that’s going to save your life, it’s the skill of patient attention to detail that comes from knowing the family tree down to the remotest second cousin – and that’s always in Latin. English local names for plants can be incredibly poetic and can point you in the direction of possible uses but – sadly –  they’re also very local, so in Derbyshire cow parsley was once known locally as cicily, and an incautious Gloucestershire cook who tried to sweeten their rhubarb with cow parsley would be in for a disappintment.

I have to warn you that this is where I go into full-on obsessive mode – in fact I didn’t post yesterday because the very small amount of time I wasn’t wheelbarrowing leaves and wood chip on the allotment and cooking was spent getting overexcited about plant names. This all started, if you remember, with catching out a modern version of Culpeper’s Herbal in repeating a spelling error in the original book.  I speculated that this was just bad proof reading on Culpeper’s part coupled with a printer’s error.

Then I managed to find the incredibly useful “The Old English Herbals” by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde on the Project Gutenberg site. I found there a quotation from W Coles’ 1656 book “The Art Of Simpling” in which he passes this judgement on Culpeper:

 “Culpeper,” he says, “(a man now dead and therefore I shall speak of him as modestly as I can, for were he alive I should be more straight with him), was a man very ignorant in the forme of Simples. Many Books indeed he hath tumbled over, and transcribed as much out of them as he thought would serve his turne (though many times he were therein mistaken) but added very little of his own.” He even comments on the fact that either Culpeper or his Printer cannot spell aright—“sure he or the Printer had not learned to spell.”

Thank you very much!  – I’ll take that as a vindication, but it makes me wonder whether Culpeper’s herbal was an early example of the coffee table book; owned and displayed, read for its wonderful picture of the times and his descriptions of much loved plants but rarely actually used as a medicinal herbal. It’s certainly the case that it’s still constantly being reprinted and cited in modern books.

I know I’m being a bit of an old curmudgeon , but words really do matter – and getting them wrong leads everyone astray. In the midst of my daydreaming I went off on a brief excursus on the gillyflower.  Where does the name come from? It usually refers to the clove pink – one of the Diathus family, but several other flowers are also known as gillyflowers – so what was going on? Someone suggested it relates to the French month ‘Juillet’ – but another of the so-caled gillyflowers, the wallflower, has finished flowering by July and indeed Culpeper refers to the wallflower as the ‘winter gillyflower’.  Geofffrey Grigson suggests it comes from the French (and Spanish) word for clove – ‘girofle’, which led me to a delightful shuddering stop because not only do I love the perfume of the wallflower but I also associate it with a particular teenage memory which I’ve no intention of sharing except to say that the smell of wallflowers reminds me of one special evening. I don’t think I’ve ever associated that perfume with cloves but my goodness I’m eager to do the research in the spring.

Then on television, the night before last, we were watching Rick Stein’s new programme on French cooking and he remarked in passing that coq au vin was sometimes flavoured with blueberries – which are known in France as Myrtle. I didn’t need a 17th century book to help on that blooper, because we once ate a delicious coq au vin in an auberge in Puy de Dome (which, incidentally was the source of the first printed recipe for the dish in the early 1900’s) and it was flavoured with myrtle – which is ‘myrte’ in French.  Blueberry is known as ‘myrtille’ .  I don’t doubt that myrtille is used in French cooking where it grows in the high country, but myrte is very different, quite austere and memorable.

Anyway being addicted to lists as you may recall, I’ve started a new one with the aim of running as many of Culpeper’s plants down to their current Latin names as I can, and then finding them. But today we’re bashing the galleries again with friends. We went to a student show on Tuesday and it was pretty terrible. My instincts are that there’s nowhere near enough challenge in undergraduate teaching these days and I talked to our teacher son about it.  But he said that the kind of heavyweight challenge that I was talking about would be regarded as abusive in today’s teaching setting. I suppose he’s right, but raising the self-critical faculties would save an awful lot of bad art. It takes courage and resilience to be an artist.

Dyrham Park – which picture?

 

Looking west from Dyrham Park on the Cotswold escarpment towards Wales

I first climbed over the wall of Dyrham Park as a trespasser – about sixty years ago. I think the Blathwayt family or their descendants had long since gone and the place had been sold on to the Ministry of Works.  It was in a bad way, that’s for sure, and I’ve never quite lost the sense of not belonging there.  As a teenager I thought it was one of the most beautiful green spaces I’d ever seen – although I never dared approach the house for fear of being caught and getting into trouble.  I could cycle there in an hour and hide my bike in the bushes before I climbed over the wall, and I could see the whole of my life in a landscape from the top of the escarpment, right at the end of the Cotswolds. .

Sometimes I would  lie there in the grass, just watching the clouds pass over – it was hard to find any peace and solitude at home as a teenager.  Once the park passed into the hands of the National Trust it got easier and Madame and me have even ridden horses in the grounds, galloping across the wide open spaces a few times, but I was never going to make a confident rider.  Nowadays we’re National Trust members and so we can wave our cards and walk freely in the grounds knowing that no-one is going to ask us what we’re up to.

IMG_20191110_125434I’ve never been inside the house.  It’s the open spaces, the deer, Whitefield meadow in July, the autumn fungi the gardens and an occcasion tea and cheese scone in the cafe that we go for.  More often than not we take the long walk around the boundary, just passing by the house and the gift shop – always crowded.  Today the car parks were packed with hundreds of cars and yet by taking our favourite route we hardly saw a soul for most of the time. There wasn’t much to see in the wildflower department except for some encouraging signs of new leaves at the edges of Whitefield meadow and a solitary oxeye daisy.  The gardens were a different matter and the gardeners should be proud of the colour and variety they’ve achieved in November.

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These extraordinary Clerodendrum trichotomum – harlequin glorybower or peanut butter tree – are both exotic and thoroughly odd. Elsewhere in the formal gardens there is masses of colour, with the dogwoods just approaching their best. I’ve never been much of an enthusiast for very formal gardens, I’m more of a cottage garden, Gertrude Jekyll sort of fan but all the same we wandered around, I took a few photos and wished that someone would start a medicinal herb garden there – it would be yet another touch of authenticity for a house soaked in history.  So I had history on my mind as we wandered to the end of the formal garden, thinking about Culpeper whose 1653 herbal would have been a staple around the time the house was being restored betwen 1692 and 1704 . It was all very romantic until we turned around.MVIMG_20191110_130608

Looking back towards the house it’s impossible not to be impressed at the beautiful baroque building while being simultaeously appalled at the source of the wealth that built it. William Blathwayt made his fortune as an MP and civil servant administering the slave plantations of America. In fact I wonder how much of Bath was built on the backs of numberless slaves.  The Beckford Tower, the Georgian crescents, the Sidney Gardens.  Hugely important architecturally and historically; generating millions in revenue from tourism every year and yet fatally compromised for me by the suffering that made them possible.  And that’s why I’ve never been inside the house, because all that architectural beauty came at a price. The beauty and ecological richness of the surrounding parkland is still uplifting even as the environment is under threat but it never truly belonged to us.

“There’s no such thing as clean money” I used to say glibly to anyone who criticised St Mary Redcliffe where I worked,  for being built on slave money. I was wrong. The issue as to whether slavery was evil is settled, but the issue of how we live with its fruits is not. British taxpayers didn’t finish paying off the debt incurred by compensating slave owners for the loss of their “property” until four years ago. Yes four years ago. It’s Remembrance Sunday today.  Remembering is, or ought to be, more than a sentimental costume drama.  Remembering is radical, dangerous and challenging, it makes demands on us.  Even a simple walk on a sunny day can get swept into its vortex.

As promised – borlotti beans

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Two days ago I was in the throes of changing my mobile and I wrote that I’d rather be talking about borlotti beans than grappling with passwords and strange operating systems. Then of course it all miraculouly worked and I was so pleased we went out on a photo tour of Bath to test the camera which – I have to say – is extremely clever but a bit baffling a times.

So here, as promised, are the borlotti beans and I think they’re very beautiful.  We’re saving half of them for next year’s seed (they’re open pollinated) just to see how they do. I’m not entirely sure how this could be of any great interest to anyone else, but after decades of listening to other peoples’ stories, I know how fascinating the everyday details of another life can be, and one thing I am completely sure of is that I’m no expert and I’d hate for anyone to take me as an authority on any of the things I write about.

Life is a project and every project contains within it the possibility of failure.

That sounds like a chunk of management speak, I know, but a life without any egg on your face is a dull prospect, and if I sow seeds at the wrong time, or misread a recipe then at least I share my idiocy free of charge and without leading a whole country into bankruptcy.

At this moment, however, I am beguiled by plans for next season. In my typically freely associating way (it’s a useful skill and it helps to have some psychoanalytic experiences) I move like a small stream from yesterday’s joy at finding some lungwort, seeing our Sweet Cicily in flower, to thinking about the Mugwort I’ve got stored in a cupboard next to the Christmas cake.  From there it’s an effortless step to my growing collection of herbals and thence (you know where this is going to go) to a flourishing physic garden  growing somewhere in a corner of my mind.

When I went to theological college there was a fellow student who had experienced a profound religious conversion on the toilet. I have found that the minute detals of conversion experiences tend to figure largely in what’s known in the trade as “testimony”. Anyway, there was more to follow because he also felt compelled to tell us that he had been “deeply involved” with morris dancing which he now understood as being inspired by magic and other devilish practices. Although I found the story hilariously funny at the time, I confess that my own secret policeman is inclined to whisper sweet ‘nothing doings’ in my ear when I stray from the scientific uplands of proper field botany or allotmenteering to the dangerous underground of traditional herbal medicine. “call it a project” I say to myself and feel better at once.

The ‘nature of things’, seen purely from a scientific perspective seems to me to be a rather ‘thin’ reductive description. ‘Lungwort – Pulmonaria officinalis – is a member of the borage family and used to be thought useful in the treatment of lung diseases’  – so says the dictionary, and it’s true but hardly gathers together the rich strands of usage and history, the religious background, the ‘common sense’ of the day and all the multitude of factors that contribute to the ‘thick’ description of Lungwort, and which transform it from a relic of the ignorance of the past, into a portal through which I can access the past, listen in to its gossip, share its hopes, fears and preoccupations.  And so when I walk to a patch of vegetation on the edge of the canal, I greet so much more than just another plant I can name. It becomes the key to thousands of years of communal wisdom, and I learn something about my own fugitive existence on the earth.

There you go – a bit of free association can lead you into all sorts of trouble.  Still, I saw the other day, in one of my books, that a cup of mugwort tea at bedtime can bestow ‘lucid dreams’.  That would make a nice change and I might give it a go one of these days! Meanwhile the physic garden hovers discreetly at the back of my mind except that almost everything I’d put in it is freely available on the paths and in the parks of Bath  – if only I knew what all these plants looked like. Now that looks like a proper project.