To be honest – apart from the tourist guides – this is not a typical moment in Georgian Bath; or at least not during daylight hours. Half a mile East and you might imagine you’re in Oxford street, London; the same distance to the north and south would see you at the end of the Cotswolds or across the river, deep fingers of countryside and Georgiana separated by large estates of social housing. This particular place, Royal Crescent – and no-one can deny its grace and beauty – is normally crowded with tourists.
We live in a similarly divided cultural world. Beggars and Big Issue sellers rub shoulders with tourists whilst we locals practice arcane navigations to cross the tides of tourists and traverse the city. We hardly know who we are. Anyone who comes here probably has a better idea of their true identity, whether it be Roman legionnaire or Regency Buck; Hello magazine bride-to-be or Emma Woodhouse practicing lip pursing in case they meet someone they fancy. We have as much cultural stability as a seaside resort in August. On Friday afternoons the pavements tremble to the sounds of wheelie suitcases – we call it the Barcelona rumble, and on Sunday afternoons they depart. Mondays are quieter. Speed limits are for the little people who change the sheets, flip burgers on minimum wage and pick up the litter. Yet we locals only have to walk a few hundred yards and pick the right time to find peace. You could throw a stick from Royal Crescent as far as three allotment sites, and walk in ten minutes down Cow Lane – whose sign has been stolen by a Jane Austen trophy hunter – to Victoria park and the Botanical Gardens. And whilst the Kennet and Avon canal towpath is busy for the first mile eastwards from the bus station, walking west along the riverside walk, apart from commuting cyclists and runners. you’ll have abundant time and space to check out the local weeds: well at least I do, and many of them turn out to be gratifyingly rare!
One of the unique joys of Bath is the fact that you can stand almost anywhere and see the countryside up on the surrounding hills. Notwithstanding the worst efforts of the riverside property developers, once you climb upwards by about 75 feet you can look across the grim tenements of the future into North Somerset, Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire. From the riverside the developments look more like bonded warehouses; uniformly dull and bleak and battered by their own architectural whirlwinds.
So let’s turn our attention to the parts of the city centre where the wild has infiltrated, We have otters and even beavers in the river now. Herons, sparrowhawks, peregrines, tawny owls, swifts, swallows, housemartins and the whole gamut of garden birds – although you might have to walk a way to find sparrows and starlings which are scarce. In early summer you can see dace sparkling in the river, and in some of the tributary streams there are signal crayfish which have displaced the locals. On our allotment we have even filmed deer, but more commonly it’s squirrels, badgers, foxes, cats and rats; lots of rats.
Mostly we don’t see the night visitors but we have a trail cam running continuously and we also find lots of characteristic signs of their presence. Last night we got an incredibly lucky shot of one of our resident foxes emerging from behind the polytunnel with a large rat in its mouth. We’ve had three traps set in the same run for two weeks now and never got a sniff of a rat, but the fox knows where they are and can crouch silently until a warm takeaway supper comes along. We have read about foxes predating on rats but this hard evidence was really exciting. Other than the fox, the only other taker for the peanut butter bait was a badger who shook and bashed one of the heavy duty box traps until it sprang shut without yielding the peanut. This almost redeems the foxes from their countryside capers – raiding our chickens when we lived on Severnside.
Aside from mammals, we have dragonflies, damselflies, ivy bees, hoverflies, wasps, spiders, beetles and butterflies all sharing the plot with us and this year we’ll be trapping moths to add to our knowledge of the night shift. You’d never believe the diversity of our wildlife if your only experience of Bath was gained from a weekend shopping expedition on Milsom Street. Our allotment is in the middle of the city and yet we probably have more wild diversity than a chemical drenched arable field in the countryside. You just have to learn to be very quiet and watch.
Here’s a video link of fox v rat- it’s too big to attach here but I hope you enjoy it. Nature red in tooth and claw!
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.
We walk into the supermarket or log on to Amazon and it’s all there; the cornucopia, the works – everything the contented human being could possibly want. Except in times of scarcity, after snow or flood or during an epidemic when the shelves are empty and then we’re angry.
Yesterday we had a light frost. We walked down the steep slope to the allotment and the sun – we are almost at the winter solstice – transits behind a row of trees low in the sky – was unable to warm the soil on any of our plot. The overnight temperature according to the trailcam was 2C.
Our culture directs our instincts to want to take control. We have come to believe that each of us – apart from losers who don’t count – is some kind of tabula rasa on which we are free to inscribe whatever we want; fulfillment, creativity, success; even new and more attractive silicone lips. If you can be bothered you can easily test my hypothesis by counting how many times the word control crops up in an evening’s TV ads. Without adequate control, we are all smelly, leaky and horribly unattractive, betrayed by our unforgivable lack of the Big C which is always available – at a price – from a retailer near you.
The sad truth of course is that by the time you’ve been programmed to aspire harder and show the world who you really are it’s too late. You’ve already lost who you really are to the expensively curated simulacrum who gloats back at you in the mirror and demands more, more, and yet more.
If allotmenteering is even remotely therapeutic, as is universally claimed but rarely actually tested; it’s closer to psychoanalytic psychotherapy than that it is to happy days in the sunshine. We are not blank canvases and neither is the earth. Just as we have no retrospective agency with our appearance or with our childhood and past history, neither has the earth. The question we have to take to each session is – “why am I as I am?” “Why do I need to take control all the time?” and for any allotmenteer, and I know this may sound ridiculous, “why do I have such a complicated relationship with this patch of earth?” Why do weeds upset me so much? Why do I have this boundless fear of rats but not – let’s say – hedgehogs? Why did I feel I had to destroy anything that occupied my [?] allotment when I moved on to it. Why am I so obsessively protective of its boundaries? Why do I want so much to kill pests. What is it about badgers that I like most of the time, until they eat my sweetcorn?
If you look at the photograph at the top of this post, you may recognise one of the the tracks up the Blackdown ridge on Mendip. If by some mischance you were to inherit this lovely patch of earth you could decide to grow almost anything. You could decide but you wouldn’t succeed because this land has history; millions of years of it. Once upon a time it was at the bottom of the sea but now it’s at the top of a range of hills. The point where I stood when I took the photograph is above a deep layer of carboniferous limestone, and likely way under your feet there are still undiscovered cave systems. Rod’s pot, Read’s cavern are entered just beyond and below the horizon. Walk on half a mile and (unless you know your plants) you’d never know that you are standing on a cap of acidic sandstone. What will grow on one substrate won’t grow on the other so none of your controlling instincts will prevail. You’ll just have to go with the soil.
Our allotment is on the kind of soil called “clay loam” – we easily checked that with open source maps. This soil – when it’s in its natural state – will bind together in a ball due to its clay content. It’s naturally quite fertile but it can be hard to work when it’s dried out and you shouldn’t trample all over it when it’s wet. This immediately suggests working the allotment in beds, sufficiently narrow to reach from both sides. We also built deep paths filled with wood chip to drain away surplus water. We even tested the soil for pH – it was somewhere near the middle between acid and alkaline. Vegetables have strong preferences regarding soil types and where they prefer to grow. It sounds complicated but the point is that you can’t raze it flat and then flip through the seed catalogues hoping to grow anything you fancy. You have to negotiate if you don’t want to fail. We’re in a frost pocket at the bottom of a steep slope; that’s a problem. On the other hand we’re sheltered from the prevailing South-westerly winds by a row of trees. The plots at the top get a lot more sunshine but their sheds regularly blow down. We have to carry everything down a narrow path to our plot, but we’re pretty well out of sight from the main track which makes it so much easier for compost deliveries and thieves. Control is a fantasy when it comes to growing on an allotment. We can’t order the weather, put up notices to forbid allium leaf miner or asparagus beetle, or plan surpluses of apples which might, like this season, bless us and in others fail to appear or suffer from codling moth.
What goes on invisibly and under the surface of the soil is almost miraculous. Some thuggish plants will even resort to subterranean poisoning to get their own way while tiny nematodes and the smallest slugs can chomp away at the roots of your vegetables: …. “And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum!” 95% of plants apparently have fungal relationships; none of these are visible to us, but their invisibility can’t make them invulnerable to the onslaught of chemicals we use to assert our control over pests and diseases, and I saw in the newspaper today that climate change and global heating are dramatically increasing the spread of pests and diseases, not to mention extreme weather events; storms and heatwaves. Fungicides and pesticides with artificial fertilisers have wrought havoc with the soil structure and depth. The earth is not a blank canvas and we can’t do as we please to it without compromising our own existence.
I recall a couple of farming proverbs that we’d do well to pay attention to:
Live as if you’re going to die tomorrow, farm as if you’re going to live forever
The farmer’s boot is the best fertilizer
If allotmenteering is therapeutic at all it’s in the way that it teaches us a kind of humility – the root of the word refers to humus the condition of the earth, the soil. Don’t try to control; accept, even embrace failure and success as two sides of the same coin. The urge to subdue, to dominate and to control isn’t new, it goes back to the creation myths of the Old Testament as does the subjugation of Eve to Adam. We reject the second of those myths and we should equally turn away from the first.
Have you ever noticed that gardeners are often really nice people? Is it the therapy of crumbling the earth between your fingers, watching a robin feed on grubs you’ve just exposed and watching the clouds for rain ? or is it perhaps the botox injections? Hmm – that’s a tough one!
It’s the month, if not the day of reckoning on the allotment and two days before the solstice marks the turning of the seasons. After a terrible summer and regular visits to the hospital we almost gave it up, but we’re both so glad now we are both miles better that we didn’t. If you’re new to allotmenteering you need to know that as well as all the close to nature / mother earth stuff there are times when you would just like to walk away. Gardening – as I’ve often said – is a dialogue with the crops, the earth, the weather, the pests and the weeds and sometimes we can hardly get a word in edgeways. Lesson number one in allotmenteering is that you’ll never win them all. The price of fresh air and fresh veg is that you have to accept occasional failures and even (thankfully rarely) vandalism. The boards that edged our beds ten years ago have gone rotten in many places and would cost a lot of money to replace. The couch grass and bindweed that we vanquished by deep digging when we took the plots on have crept back because their rhizomes laughed at drought and just went deeper. So this autumn we’ve had to repeat some of the jobs we thought we put behind us for good.
Going organic is relatively easy if you just mean no chemicals, but no-dig can be hard if you’re dealing with weed infestations. We don’t let the perfect drive out the good and so this autumn we declared war on the weeds even if it meant digging some of them out. Fortunately, couch grass and bindweed – our biggest problem – are quite lazy and they’ve tended to use our wood chip paths as highways; making them very easy to pull out. However they also creep in from the edges and on to the beds and then we dig every few years. Yes of course the structure of the upper layer is precious, but the couch in particular produces chemical substances called allelochemicals which inhibit competition from nearby crop plants. Paths – it turns out – are great vectors of weed infestations and deserve as much attention as crop beds. Our paths were dug 18″ deep in the first place to provide drainage for the beds when filled with wood chips. They need topping up every year because the chips gradually rot down into rich black soil. Our soil is clay loam – we’re in a river valley so it’s alluvial and inclined to poach in wet weather. We’ve also got a spring running beneath several of the beds which can be as difficult as drought in the winter, especially for tree roots. One of my resolutions for the coming year is to have a go at water divining and see where they actually run.
As we refurbish the paths we use a heavy mattock – pictured on the left in the photo – to break up the surface and loosen the weed roots so they can be removed and burnt. Then we top up with wood chips and occasionally we go the whole hog and lay weed control mat on the cleared ground with wood chip on top. It’s one of those occasions when attention to detail is crucial and we try to remove every tiny fragment of rhizome.
The area in front of the greenhouse is getting the gold star treatment this year with a triple layer of cleared soil, cardboard, weed control mat and finally wood chip. The new autumn raspberry bed next to it has been given a thick layer of Jacob’s fleece from our friends in Brecon covered with yet more wood chip – we use many barrow loads of the stuff. Raspberries like warm feet. Last night we filmed the badger on the trailcam; digging away at the raspberry bed, presumably looking for the dead sheep. Apparently they will eat carrion if they’re really hungry, but this badger is as fat as we’ve ever seen. We’ve also recorded two cats, loads of rats and a pair of foxes. The rats are a constant nuisance but they’re creatures of habit and tomorrow, if the weather holds, I’ll be digging the narrow gap between the compost bins and the polytunnel to locate their nest and block it off.
The Mattock mattock design is as old as the hills and it’s used around the world for breaking up the earth before sowing. You might be tempted to get a lightweight version but the solid cast steel heavyweight is the one to go for, and don’t be afraid to give it some welly. As my grandfather always said, let the saw do the work and that applies to any tool equally well. Never economise on buying the best tools you can afford because they’ll more than pay for themselves in saved time, energy and painkillers.
We finally repaired the window of the vandalised shed a few weeks ago. We went to a specialist glass company and I asked the price of a single sheet of the wired toughened glass. The man on the desk said “before I cut it I’ll tell you how much it will cost” – it would have been well over £100 and I said I could buy a new shed for not much more. So we settled for a different type of toughened glass at a third of the price. Isn’t it a shame that we have to resort to such precautions against vandalism? Anyway it looks miles better than it did with an old compost bag flapping away in the wind.
Going back to the subject of digging, I’d really recommend getting hold of the two tools in the photo above if you’ve got very heavy or stony soil. The spade is quite expensive – around £50 and known as a groundbreaker. It’s very strong with a pointed, heavy and polished stainless steel blade and it was a revelation as we cleared the allotment. It really does make digging easier. It’s based on the traditional Cornish spade design which has a long straight shaft and no handle and is universally used by gravediggers who know a thing or two about digging deep holes in stony ground!
All the other tools will come with time, and you’ll learn how important it is to buy the tools and use the techniques that suit you and your own patch of earth. I’d suggest a wheelbarrow with foam filled tyres and a large capacity will be useful and then, as need arises you can buy all sorts of other useful tools – not just the hideously expensive, hand made, damascus steel Japanese trowels without which some gardening celebrities wouldn’t plant a broad bean.
And possibly the most important lesson is that plant breeders know a thing or two about pests and diseases and use their knowledge to produce blight resistant, disease resistant, pest resistant, and now drought resistant strains of all manner of vegetables. Don’t be sucked into the heritage vegetable trap as an automatic first choice. Don’t rush out and buy a Cox’s Orange Pippin just because it’s a heritage variety when there are much better yielding and better tasting varieties out there with greater disease resistance. Look around and take some advice because there are lovely old apples and pears out there that don’t need spraying every five minutes and won’t fall over in a dead faint when they get a bit of frost. And good luck – you can throw away those vitamin D tablets and get some of the hard stuff straight out of the sky.
We want change but we want nothing altered – William Cobbett
Three Cornish pasties
I was shocked today to discover that I have a bit of an obsession with food. My shock was brought about by the sheer number of food photographs I’ve taken while I was looking for pictures to illustrate this post on the subject of what’s come to be known as Regional Food after reading a piece in the Guardian about a recently published book by the Italian academic Alberto Grandi called La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist). He argues that in reality there was no substantial Italian cuisine (the choice of the French term ‘cuisine’ rather gives the game away). What we know as the rather mythic pasta + nonna idea came into existence when so many utterly impoverished migrants left italy and arrived in America where they experienced an abundance of food for the first time. I’ve seen that happen myself. Back in the eighties I was on a course with students from all over the world and one of them was from Eastern Europe. He kept going missing but we could always find him gazing into the window of a local butcher – he’d never seen anything like it. He was so overwhelmed with the abundance of our food that we would take extra each meal and pass it to him. Grandi describes that cultural collision as you might describe an F1 hybrid. Two less productive strains interbreeding can bring about fantastically productive offspring. He’s not saying that there is no Italian food tradition, but that – real as it may be today – it’s not very old. It got me thinking about other so-called traditions that you would never have found in their alleged countries of origin – Balti and Korma owe more to Birmingham than to India; most French haute cuisine can be attributed to the unemployed chefs of the post revolutionary vanquished rich. Fusion cooking to the collision of Australia with Japan; Chinese cooking which came to be known and popularised by waves of immigrant chefs in chip shops but which barely scratched the surface of the diverse cultures of such a huge nation. And then there’s the great unwashed – the tradition of english cooking.
My mind travelled back almost immediately to William Cobbett, radical, grumpy and outrageously opinionated pamphleteer as well as hilariously funny writer. In Cottage Economy he tried to set out the proper diet for an Englishman and got very indignant about potatoes which he thought made farm labourers weak and lazy, and the drinking of tea which he said made women into gossips and made men become effeminate. For Cobbett, the only proper diet was based on bread, bacon and beer; grown, fattened and brewed by the happy labourer. The two books, “Cottage Economy” and “Rural Rides“; written in the shadow of poverty and starvation after years of war are still worth reading if only for a glimpse of his burning indignation. Bacon and eggs, Sunday Roast, good bread and plenty of meat became the iconic staples of the English diet, especially in the wake of wartime rationing. Meat and two veg was at least factually accurate even when it became a snide insult. It was the diet I grew up on.
Heaven forfend – chillies, borlotti, passata – what’s the world coming to?
Madame had more contact with an alternative tradition because one of her aunts had married into money, and she spent holidays as a companion for a cousin. It was whilst staying there (just the once) that I read Mrs Beeton and wondered at the extravagance of some of the recipes – “take a dozen eggs and three pints of best cream” – that kind of thing. I didn’t laugh at it – I wanted some of it for us too. After we got married and realized that neither of us could cook, a friend gave us some Elizabeth David and so now my list of inspirational writers extends to dozens, and they fill bookcases in the flat.
As for English cuisine; looking through the photos I’d say there is still a very diverse history of English cooking. After Mrs Beeton; Eliza Acton, Jane Grigson, Dorothy Hartley are among many more food writers who kept the tradition alive and many others have carried on to the present day. Even if there never was a properly understood traditional cuisine, there was always an uncollated mass of good recipes made excellent with fresh vegetables, meat and fish. As ever, cooking and eating what’s to hand and affordable – fish or lamb, pork or beef depends on a wealth of non-culinary variables and the lazy journalistic trick of listing the best of everything from trifles to testicles is just silly. Even a bucket of offal, like the one below, when respectfully and creatively prepared and cooked, can be a feast. (It can also be terrible – trust me).
Patés, cakes, puddings, toad in the hole, cheeses, faggots and bread with all manner of vegetables are still on the Potwell Inn menu. In the last three days we had Sunday roast; liver and onions and then – classical leftover food- cold chicken with bubble and squeak and home made chutney. Shopping and cooking, then sharing a meal with friends and family is one of the great creative joys of being alive. Slow food needs to be accompanied by slow eating.
But food – like every other aspect of culture in the UK – is deeply influenced by social class. Back in the 80’s we were living (as ever) in a block of flats and upstairs there was another tenant who came from a profoundly different and bourgeois background. We got on pretty well in general but one day she came down to see us about something just as we were making some food for my parents. Later her husband came down in fits of laughter and told us that she’d rushed upstairs and said “R – You have to go down and see Dave and his wife, they’re making a real working class tea! It was the tinned salmon sandwiches that did for us, I think. Major class signifier!
The problem today is not so much which recipes people cook, but that so many people don’t cook at all. The traditional meat and two veg diet was pretty boring, but properly cooked it’s still a nutritious meal, unlike the ultra processed foods that are slowly poisoning a whole generation and inexorably lowering the quality and life-expectancy of the life of the poor but also the well paid but chronically overworked people in the middle . The challenge is that when you’re struggling to pay the rent there just isn’t time to bone a breast of lamb, let alone grow an allotment and when you’re working 12 hours a day and six days a week like many professionals have to do; then time, not money is the limiting factor.
But eating out can be a far more dispiriting experience even than a takeaway – what with the virtual extinction of properly trained chefs. Two of our sons are chefs and they tell us that many young people looking for jobs have never eaten good food, and are unaware that kitchens are dangerous places in which hot fat, slippery floors and sharp knives can cause serious injury.
So I’m not saying that regional cuisines don’t exist, but that in the hands of skilled and well read cooks and chefs, a miracle can happen in which local English foods, like lamb, bacon, thyme, potatoes and carrots with the addition of a glass of wine and some garlic , can be inflected with the flavours of Provence and become carbonnade nimoise. Regional food is a dance performed by a skilled and knowledgeable cook, a selection of local fresh produce and a well equipped kitchen informed with wisdom and love.
Sherry trifle – one sponge, one bottle of sherry? The glacė angelica took a bit of finding!
Today we were supposed to be in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons in old money), but sadly the weather had other ideas. Storm Bram managed to virtually shut down the road and rail links between England and Wales. The Prince of Wales bridge was reduced to one lane each way because the lamp posts were discovered to be liable to collapse on to the carriageway, and the M48 bridge was just closed, along with some of the railway services. There were two hour traffic jams in both directions so, having packed ready to go we unpacked again, hoping we can set out early tomorrow. I hesitate to bang on about climate change, but really our long neglected infrastructure is in such a bad way that even normal weather, let alone the extremes we now expect are enough to shut us down.
So rather than a report from Wales, here are some videos from the allotment, taken on the trailcam. The opener is, of course, the rat. Rats are everywhere, they carry diseases and love to live in poorly made compost bins. Given a choice of anything to eat on an allotment they invariably seem to prefer our crops, and we’ve watched a rat clinging to a swaying sweetcorn cob and chewing away at our lunch. Badgers also like sweetcorn in the same way that bears like honey, but badgers have other virtues and it’s relatively easy to keep them away from the maize. But rats seem to have few virtues and although tidiness is an overrated virtue on allotments it’s certainly the case that we need to pick up fallen fruit and any other rubbish that would attract them. Sadly, a poorly made compost heap – especially if kitchen waste and cooked food are added to it – and if access is easy (and rats are great at digging tunnels) they’re going to move in and breed as rats like to do. Of the night time videos from the trailcam, rats outnumber all the other animals we see.
We also entertain a couple of cats who, we assume patrol at night in search of prey like small mammals. It would be a brave cat, though, that would tackle some of the clonking great rats we’ve filmed. Foxes and badgers are in a different league. Firstly they are (foxes) fast and (badgers) powerful and they both eat rats. Judging by the size of one of our badgers, they eat a lot of rats!
We like to do our bit to control the rat population and we use heavy duty spring traps baited with peanut butter. The traps are in strong boxes and although they’re not attracting many visitors the badgers just love peanuts and so they will worry the boxes to try to get at the bait, and shake them until you hear them spring. We don’t use poison because there’s always a danger of secondary poisoning to other carrion eaters. Mostly the badgers eat slugs and worms but they’re such lovely creatures we let them take friends and foes – (just not sweetcorn). As I look through dozens of videos I also notice that the rats make themselves scarce whenever there’s a fox or a badger in the vicinity so they also have a deterrent effect.
Foxes too eat rats, and if they mark their territory – which we can easily smell for ourselves – this acts as a deterrent as well. We’ve seen foxes with mange in the past but fortunately our local ones seem fine and healthy. Here’s a magnificent shot of a dog fox prowling one of the rat runs. Isn’t he beautiful? especially right at the end of the video when he pokes his head out behind the tayberry.
So there’s always a lot going on at night on the allotment – in fact it’s quite busy. Yes, of course, we get visited by two legged rats as well and like many of our neighbouring allotmenteers we get things stolen, but as long as we take home any power tools and fix double locks on the shed, greenhouse and polytunnel, then we’re mostly troubled by casual vandalism which is upsetting and annoying but – like collapsing bridges and floods – has its history and causes and won’t be ended by sloganising politicians. Don’t build prisons, build youth clubs! We’d love to teach some apprentice allotmenteers the basics!
Other than that we’re almost ready for winter. Yesterday we mixed a couple of barrow loads of topsoil and compost, filled some leftover feed buckets and planted strawberry runners to give us an early polytunnel crop. I love strawberries and they’re expensive in the shops, so it’s a joy to grow them for ourselves. Growing at least some of our own food gives us so much pleasure, but it’s good to bear in mind that good gardening involves a four way conversation between the crop, the soil, the weather and the pests. There’s no room for a control freak on the allotment. We have to accept – as an astrologer once told me of the stars – that these four dispose but can’t compel. The biggest and best lessons in gardening are as likely to come from failure as from success. I love the fact that the night watch is busy while we rest. Sometimes we turn up in the morning to find the wood chip paths turned over, sometimes obviously by badgers with their strong claws but often by thrushes and blackbirds who delight in eating pests so that we don’t have to persecute them.
Our greatest regret is that we have never – in ten years – seen a hedgehog. They really should be there and I’m afraid that badgers are a major predator, so perhaps that’s just an unwanted outcome of the eternal balancing act of nature. But now the weather will improve and the bridges will open and early tomorrow we’ll drive up to the Bannau to meet our friends for a shared birthday and maybe find some new plants or fungi to photograph. The season is nearly over now but there’s always something to capture our interest. And finally – badger versus rat trap – keep looking on the left hand side of the frame and listen out for the trap springing. The trap didn’t get the badger (as if!) and the badger didn’t get the peanut butter. Nil nil draw, then.
I remember taking this photograph for two reasons; firstly because I was annoyed with myself for not knowing what what this seagull was called but more importantly, as it turned out, because it led me to make a stupidly hubristic promise to myself that I wouldn’t, any more, walk past anything I couldn’t name. With 20/20 retrospective vision I wish I’d left “walk on by” as a heading on my mental spreadsheet but in fact I immediately left the quayside at St Ives to find a bookshop to help end my personal dark age. So I ended up with the worst of all worlds – not knowing the proper names of most plants, birds, fungi, lichens, insects and mammals but feeling very troubled when I failed.
The reason I’m writing this today is that after a talk at the Bath Natural History Society on Tuesday I was chatting to the speaker, Lucy Starling and she wondered aloud where all the black-headed gulls had gone. Back in 2016 by the time I’d figured out what they were; (complicated by the fact that they don’t have black heads at all during the winter but just a grey streak like a question mark behind the ear); I realized that there were dozens if not hundreds of them in Bath, flocking together on the green outside our flat in the mornings. They are lovely little birds – small seagulls – but they have declined so much that they’ve now been listed with an amber warning.
So why has this happened? Well, rather carelessly I attributed this to the theft by commercial foragers of thousands of their eggs from nesting sites on the South coast a few years ago for sale to high end restaurants; which is astonishing but true! But in any case the trend has been towards them living inland, and there are other factors – avian flu, lack of nesting space (the good people of Bath are highly intolerant of gulls, although their bird identification skills are no better than mine were). We have three species in Bath. The principal culprits when it comes to early morning noise, rubbish bag spreading and stealing ice creams would be herring gulls or less likely lesser black backed gulls. Herring gulls too are in decline. We don’t have greater black backed gulls here but they’re the ones with the terrifying eyes that could turn you to stone. They’ve all been affected by climate change; absence of food due to changing farming practices and loss of habitat. So below are – on the left a herring gull (pale grey wings and pink legs) and on the right a lesser black-backed gull (darker grey, almost black with yellow legs).
From my entirely non-scientific survey through the living room window, I’d say that aside from the odd stragglers up and down the river, the large gatherings of black headed gulls have gone, possibly for ever.
Two black-headed gulls chatting on a fence.
I didn’t mention one other contributor to the decline and that’s predation. The photo above was taken across the river from St John’s Church – which houses a pair of peregrine falcons for whom a small gull would barely amount to elevenses.
So just to make a more complete list of urban birds we’d have to add the three gulls; kingfishers near the Royal Mail sorting office; the well known Widcombe herons whose heronry is above the Honda dealership; plus the jackdaws, crows, magpies, and jays representing the corvids and there are cormorants fishing in the river. Then there are blackbirds and pigeons, robins but not, sadly, sparrows or starlings close to us. There are swifts in the summer, with swallows and house-martins and then rarer appearances from the avian odds and sods categories. The red kites don’t seem to cross the river but buzzards are often seen over the allotment. The first night after we moved in, we heard tawny owls calling, but never since – however our neighbour Charlie says he still hears them regularly. All in all – and this is just an off the top of my head list – simply knowing their names has given me enormous pleasure over the years. It creates a feeling of belonging when you know the locals by name.
I’ve written a lot about urban plants on this blog, and when I get the fungi organized I’ll be able to name many more of them. My point in banging on about urban wildlife is that it’s right outside the door and so walking to Sainsbury’s can be as much of a field-trip as a long drive to Cornwall (which we also do regularly of course). Possibly the best place to find wildlife is where you are. Of course I’m not saying that travelling to hotspots isn’t worth it because you’ll never learn more quickly than when you walk with an expert who’s also a good teacher. But an hour’s mild bewilderment followed by a couple of hours of research will drive the message home more. Both is best.
A quick trip to America
A further update to the is it/isn’t it? problem with a tree full of black apples on the allotment site. After a lot of searching online we think we’ve finally nailed it down to the Arkansas Black mainly due to its extraordinary, complex flavour. The perfume of the flesh eaten raw is – as I previously said – like apple and custard in one bite. Today Madame peeled and stewed a small number and they were equally delicious. Just like a Cox, they kept their texture very well and didn’t reduce to a pulp as would a bramley – so they’d be great for a French style open apple tart. The only problem is we can’t find a UK nursery who could provide it on a dwarfing or semi dwarfing rootstock. Madame is going to try growing it from a cutting but apparently it’s hard to do and it would take years to fruit. She could polish up on her grafting skills too! It’s a perfect tree for our frost prone allotment because it will grow in almost any zone, is self fertile and very disease resistant. Plus it stores well and harvests in November. What’s not to like? I could buy it from a nursery in Montana but I don’t think the car would get there.
Honey fungus mycelium on a tree stump. It’s called a rhizomorph because of its shape – like a rhizome.
Sometimes it seems – although I don’t believe a word of it really – sometimes the stars get themselves into a truly malignant alignment and the boils, frogs, flies and rain just keep coming without remission. This last year, what with the campervan constantly breaking down, the extreme weather and an onslaught of health problems has been an all-round shitter! Add to that the election of a malignant government whose big idea is to preserve everything that was wrong about the past 50 years and crush the best in order just to stay in power and ….. ? well, you decide.
I’ve written before about the challenge of accepting good news amidst a sea of effluent but this last few of weeks, having got rid of the polyps in my bowel which were causing iron deficiency anaemia; last week I finally got an appointment to fit my new hearing aids after waiting 8 months, and another appointment to sign off on the laser peripheral iridotomy so I can get some new glasses. Oh joy! and to cap it all I feel better – which is a non scientific way of saying that it’s marvellous to be able to wheelbarrow full loads of wood chip down to the allotment without having to keep stopping to catch my breath. I can see the end of the tunnel although it’s just a small disc of light at the moment. The campervan is fixed, we have a list of adventures planned for 2026, the allotment is all but ready for next season and –
– having met my targets for plant species and records, I’ve now turned to processing my fungus photos – and this is going to be an altogether harder task because until a couple of years ago I had no idea what, apart from field mushrooms and fly agarics, what most of them are called. Yes it’s true; I am a proper propellerhead. Anyway I thought I’d start with this image because the fungi – OK toadstools – we see are only a very small part of the actual fungus. Most of it comprises minute underground threads, collectively called mycelium, that can extend for many feet and occasionally miles around the part we see in the autumn. As instanced by the Honey fungus at the top of this piece, Honey fungus species actually weave their minute thread-like hyphae into ropes and so we can glimpse the underground world on a tree stump.
Getting ready for this festival of bafflement I’ve done what I always do and read a lot of books that are way beyond my understanding, in the hope that some of the research sticks . I won’t bore you with a list except to say that for the last year I’ve been gradually searching for second hand copies of the most important ones. I can never afford to buy new academic books – they’re ridiculously expensive and only for well-heeled university libraries. There’s also loads of good stuff available online; especially on the British Mycological Society Facebook page.
What I’ve learned has given me an entirely new perspective on the benefits of fungi not only to our ecosystem but to our health and wellbeing as well. These days we’re very familiar with the importance of pollinator plants at the beginning of the life process. We’re not so thoughtful about what happens at the end. At its simplest, without fungi we couldn’t survive because whatever lives also dies, at which point the fungi move in and reduce the senescent remains to their original constituents. Without fungi the earth would be covered with a layer of dead material of unfathomable depth. Sometimes, as any farmer or gardener could tell you, the fungi move in too soon and finish their lunch and our crops before we’ve been able to harvest them. The problem with drenching the field or the garden with fungicide is that without the silent work of fungi there would be no soil in which to grow the next crop because the overwhelming majority of plants and trees have what’s called mycorrhizal relationships with fungi; a constructive and complementary relationship in which the fungi supply essential nutrients to the plant in return for some of the photosynthesised sugars which its leaves produce. There is some evidence – because mycelial relationships are so important to the health and therefore the eventual crop; that fungicides can weaken the plant and make it even more vulnerable to fungal pathogens. The invisible work of fungi is immeasurably more important to us than merely filling a forager’s basket. Of course there are many more gifts from the fungi than I’m going to write about here but I want to concentrate next on the meaning of those beneficial relationships.
Porcelain fungus on beech tree
Let’s begin with Robin Wall Kimmerer whose books – as she describes them – focus on how “The factual, objective view of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people”. When we talk about ancient knowledge whether we’re embracing plants or religious, spiritual issues, it’s almost impossible to say anything without using metaphorical language. I’d argue that myth is the way that we try to tell some species of truth about mysteries. When Kimmerer writes about “mother trees” she’s using a metaphor to describe a positive relationship. “Mother trees” don’t breast feed their saplings or worry when they get home late from a night out. But it may be that there is a mycelial fungal connection between trees that allows the older trees with more resources to share those resources to nearby younger trees. What the metaphor achieves is to communicate in simple terms an important concept awaiting scientific verification. A wood or a forest is an unimaginably complex network of invisible connections which can sustain mortal damage if it’s damaged by thoughtless management. It’s a way of looking at trees which takes a broad, almost spiritual view of their meaning to us.
But just as I was about to write, I caught sight of a recent piece in the Guardian referencing fungi purely as a kind of industrial and scientific feedstock. It’s an interesting article about some possibilities of extending the use of fungi to produce building materials, packaging and even for biodegradable nappies (diapers). The science of using fungi to clean up industrial pollution is well advanced, so this is hardly big news. But what caught my attention was the way in which the article perfectly captures the contrast between two ways of looking at nature in general and fungi in particular. Kimmerer’s almost spiritual account, inflected by First Nation tradition and wisdom versus the highly instrumental scientific and rationalistic way of looking at nature as a free resource and a means of making money.
The question, or perhaps the takeaway from the two perspectives is that if we accept that climate catastrophe; species extinction; mass migration; global instability; pandemic and the degradation of the environment are all the result of our almost universally instrumental view of nature; wouldn’t it be better, rather than to join in the ugly scientific pile-on dismissing the ideas of Kimmerer and many others to allow that without a reset of our perspectives towards nature there can only be one result – and that’s the destruction of the earth.
Well it’s probably both, but for now I’ll go with the “Caucasian Wingnut” label on the tree. The other photos – in no particular order – are of my lightweight plant recording kit; the view from Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire which I’ve been going to since I was old enough to ride a pushbike and had to climb over a wall to trespass and where I’ve ridden horses, foraged St George’s mushrooms and recorded plants and fungi ever since. It’s also possible, if you walk to the edge of the escarpment, to see nearly all the places I’ve lived in since I was born. There are a pair of “then and now” photos of the cottage we lived in when we were at art school; one picture of our latest allotment; some stored dried and bottled food from it; some pots of tayberry jam and another of Priddy Pool on the Mendip hills and finally a Ragged Robin plant. They’re all extracted from the 20,000 photos I’ve spent 18 months processing down to 1000 botanical records and 500 species – which I’ll finish this week before I start on the fungi.
For the benefit of WordPress and Facebook followers who may be wondering why I’m writing this, I’m trying out a new link to Bluesky since the Facebook algorithm has blocked my posts because their computer has decided that “The Potwell Inn is a business” – no it’s not it’s the title of a comic novel by HG Wells. If the link works properly it should give present and future readers access to the whole nearly 1 million words and associated photos from the past decade. Press that follow button. You know you want to do it!!
And notwithstanding appearances I’m not saying them here either. What I am doing is attempting to photograph a very small fungus while holding a six inch ruler behind it. In plants and fungus spotting size really does matter. Here’s what I was trying to get a picture of – it’s a tiny clump of candlesnuff fungus on some dead wood up on the Mendip hills.
Two things coincided which I wanted to write something about; the first was a random comment by a young man a couple of weeks ago which rang some serious warning bells in my mind. The second reason was our first fungus hunting visit to Priddy this late autumn. As to the first challenge I should say at the start that although I’ve never consumed any kind of hallucinogenic substance I am very interested in such properties and I’m filled with wonder at the way plants and fungi can synthesize unimaginably complex molecules which have the effect of reversibly changing our brains. Anyway I was having a conversation about Psilocybin with this young man and he mentioned that Velvet Bottom was a good place to gather them. Now I know Velvet Bottom well; it’s one of my favourite places on Mendip – however I wouldn’t eat anything foraged from there because the whole site is heavily polluted with lead, zinc and even cadmium to the extent that in some patches of ground nothing will grow except a few heavy metal tolerant plant specialists. Grazing by sheep is only allowed for very short periods to maintain the habitat, and downstream in Shipham gardening has, at times, become severely restricted due to fears of cadmium poisoning. I’m sure that readers of the Potwell Inn would never dream of boiling up magic mushrooms or, for that matter Fly agarics to make tea but just in case any readers were planning post retirement breakouts, I’d advise that there are safer places than Velvet Bottom to begin a life of crime.
But I also wanted to write about the metaphorically fatal attractions of fungi which can get very obsessive. I’m just grateful it’s a relatively short season. Fungi are beautiful, strange, mysterious and fleeting visitors which spend most of their time invisible and underground. What we see are the fruiting bodies; the spore carrying parts which can carry their offspring many miles. To be fair, fungi can be very hard to identify and although there are now one or two phone apps that will have a go, they’re still nowhere near safe enough to pronounce any fungus edible. I was testing one new app while we were out and although it easily managed some simple tasks, it failed completely on quite a number. I got many warnings that such-and-so was potentially dangerous. I don’t forage theses days in any case but I have poisoned our cat – which luckily recovered, and come within a whisker of poisoning Madame and me. Even easily recognised and safe fungi – St George’s mushroom for instance has built up intolerance over any years with some real experts, and suddenly made them ill.
But there’s more than enough aesthetic and scientific interest in fungi to compensate for leaving them in the ground. I’ll just put a few pictures up below to show the huge variety of form, texture and colour that they can display – not to mention odour which can range across the whole spectrum from apricot to dead sheep. I love them, and look forward to meeting them again every autumn and then there are always lichens, mosses and liverworts to fill the dark days of winter with fascination. My suggestion would be to photograph anything you encounter that interests you and make a note of the location – you can usually do this on your phone. Then perhaps one day you’ll feel inclined to identify and organise them in a spreadsheet and make a contribution to proper science in this time of global species extinction and climate change. All these below were photographed in a short walk last Thursday.
On Saturday I mended the allotment shed window which had been smashed months ago by vandals. I thing by comparison with the fungi my handiwork lacks a certain architectural je ne sais quois !
