Category: Longer writing

No shit Sherlock! finding your plant using databases and without smoking opium.

This is the outline for a talk I was due to give to the Bath Natural History Society, and which had to be postponed due to unexpected death of the President, Rob Randall

This is Coltsfoot; Tussilago farfara It’s got a number of other names but apart from English tobacco – which I’ll come back to, none are really common. its name comes from the similarity of the leaf shape to the footprint of a small horse, hence colt. The tobacco bit comes from its inclusion in smoking mixtures which until recently were commonly offered as a herbal medicine for asthma and other chest complaints. However some recent research has revealed that the plant also contains some pretty dangerous chemical compounds called hepatotoxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids (liver toxins) which could cause more harm than good – plants and fungi are terrifically effective synthesisers; that’s why drug companies spend so much time and money investigating them. I did once try to smoke a herbal cigarette containing coltsfoot but it was truly horrible and I never went back for more.

But beyond the health warnings it’s a favourite of mine because it offers a ray of sunshine in the spring; often in the ugliest of environments; and also it’s a plant that taught me a huge lesson in plant hunting. My first awareness of it came when I was working as a groundsman on a school playing field. The second find came, years later, on a bike ride around the villages where I worked as a parish priest. It had been snowing but the snow was melting quickly and where it lay on the verge it was stained and brown with mud thrown up by cars and lorries. Suddenly, in the midst of this gloopy, brown stained, melting snow I spotted a little group of bright yellow dandelion-like flowers poking through. As an avid but very inexperienced botanist I knew that they were Coltsfoot from watercolours I’d seen in my battered field guide and on a grim day they cheered me up. I was also pleased to have seen them because I knew that they were often associated with healing properties. Then they disappeared for a decade – well actually they didn’t disappear at all but I never looked in the right places.

It’s a pound for the stone and ninety nine pounds for knowing what to do with it.

Local drystone wall builder in conversation with customer

The quotation – the reply to a silly question – arose from a chat with a local stonemason who told me how he was once asked by a prospective customer how he had the nerve to charge so much for a cheap raw material like stone. It was a wonderfully tart response and I never knew whether he lost the job as a result of it.

Don’t get despondent get organised

If there’s any primrose path to finding your quarry in field botany it’s the ability to tap into all the information you can find for free in books and on the internet. After many field trips with some real experts I began to notice the secret they never revealed. They weren’t just wandering around hoping to bump into something interesting, they had all done reconnaissance trips in advance, and they had all researched the area we were visiting in extreme detail. It wasn’t the case at all that they had encyclopaedic knowledge of every UK plant. All they needed to do – and here’s where the experience comes in – was to search the chosen area on one or another of the huge databases available – I particularly like the BSBI Ddb plant distribution atlas (Google it and you’ll find it immediately) and specify the 2X2 Km square you’re visiting – there’s a bit of a learning curve here but a little patience will soon be rewarded with a neatly laid out printable list of plants that have been recorded inside what’s known in the jargon as a Tetrad. The 1800 wildflowers that grow in Great Britain and Ireland will immediately be cut down to three or four hundred which is much more manageable. If you’re a birder or fascinated by beetles and spiders, or if larger mammals are your thing, the NBN Atlas might suit you better. It’s like the BSBI database but for all species, and you can drill down to individual records. Another alternative is to print off the plant lists for the Vice County you’re in – these are already formatted on the BSBI website when you click on the “explore and record” pull down menu tab and click on “recording cards” and print the result off. The downside is it’s Latin names only, but if you get serious about plant hunting you’re going to have to use them anyway. Most modern field guides also have thumbnail distribution maps which won’t give you the grid reference, but will at least tell you that your plant only grows in Snowdonia.

Someone humorously pointed out that distribution maps are really maps of recorders and all of the large databases contain the possibility that the plant in front of you has just never been recorded before. I just checked for our present location on the NBN Atlas and none of the four ferns within twenty yards of me have ever been recorded. Some big databases haven’t quite kept up with the momentous changes brought about by DNA analysis, and so – again today – I was surprised to see that BRERC – the Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre still has the Harts Tongue fern as Phyllitis scolopendrium when it’s been in Asplenium for some time. But don’t be hard on the compilers, there are millions of records to be checked and processed. Sometimes plants just seem to be entirely in the wrong place. Having spent hours on the Cornish coast searching for Sea Spleenwort, Asplenium marinum; I mentioned the unsuccessful search to our Vice County Recorder and she pointed out several specimens in the centre of Bath.

If, on the other hand you think you’ve found a Ghost Orchid in the garden, you can access the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 and type in “ghost” and the orchid will surely arise as the only option. Click on it and you will be given a map of the UK with just four little black spots in it. If your garden is not marked by the black spot you can be quite sure that it’s something else – not certain, mind you unless you’re out for a walk with a man called Peter Stroh and he’ll soon put you right in the nice way that really good botanists always do.

Slumping cliff without Coltsfoot – yet – in Aberdaron.

So if you’re looking for a particular plant, or group of plants, these databases can give you a huge advantage. Then you can find out everything possible about the preferred habitat for your plant. This is exactly where I went wrong with the humble Coltsfoot whose black dots seem to cover the entire country until you enlarge the map and see the gaps. Somewhere in your research you will read that the Coltsfoot is something of a pioneer plant because it loves disturbed ground, is salt tolerant, and grows particularly well on what are known as slumping cliffs. Muddy cliffs with an inclination to break down and collapse on to the beach below. So first, check the maps in the databases for the black dots, and second, look at the flowering dates. Although Coltsfoot can be identified by its leaves (which grow when flowering has finished) that’s a bit trickier because there are at least two other plants with very similar looking leaves – so Coltsfoot, smallest; Winter Heliotrope, middle sized and purple flowers from December onwards anyway; and then Butterburr which has the largest leaves of all. If you want to see the Coltsfoot flowers it has to be around March. In my book that’s learning three plants – three for one offers are good.

99% of the effort goes in before you leave home

What you should be taking from all this is the fact that 99% of the effort in finding less common plants is in the research. You probably wouldn’t do it if you were looking for Dandelions, Celandines or Primroses because they tend to turn up anywhere – they’re generalists, but perhaps most happy in springtime hedgerows, so maybe start there. But I found the Coltsfoot in abundance as soon as I started to apply the “right place, right time” approach, one day when we were walking along the beach called Porthor or known in English as Whistling Sands, here on the Lleyn peninsula.

Most of us begin naming plants by flicking through a book. That’s about as effective as standing on a bus stop and asking people if they know John Smith. With the advent of AI there are a wealth of phone apps available to help identify plants you don’t know. HOWEVER they’re not infallible and there are both more and less reputable contenders in the market. Even Google Lens can usually give you a family name with reasonable accuracy, but never trust it down to species because it seems to want to help so much that when it’s stumped it starts throwing in silly answers. With all phone apps – I’ve got loads on my phone – try another and then, when you’ve found some consistency always turn to the books.

Just a word of warning here. I left the Apple religious community three years ago and moved over to Android, and so my photos are taken on a Pixel 6a and this is being written on a Pixelbook. I gave up on Windows when I retired. Everything is stored in three places on the Cloud. The information I’m giving should work with minor variations on iPhones and most Android phones.

So finally, there’s no finer instrument than the modern mobile phone for keeping records. Most phones store what’s called EXIF data (Exchangeable Image File Format) which sounds very technical but just means that as well as exposure etc. the phone records stuff like lat and long information for the exact place the photo was taken; date and time and is often editable so that you can add the name of the plant and any other information you think is important. This allows you to create a simple searchable database of your own photos. Google tells me I can’t do this, but as long as I separate the data with commas it works pretty well because the search facility is based on a very simplified comma delimited database . No need for endless hours designing your own. Phones also offer basic GPS but for proper accuracy it’s better to use a handheld. I’ve had photos given locations ten miles from where the photo was taken. The only problem with handheld GPS is that you have to carry a notebook and make sure you link the photo to the location in case the phone GPS turns out to be unreliable. But then, as an incorrigible compiler of lists I do that anyway. The latitude and longitude data can be loaded into the OS Maps application which will obligingly give you the national grid reference equivalent without any complicated calculations and pencil chewing.

Finally, but by no means least, there are applications which allow you to submit photographs of plants with provisional id’s and get them checked by panels of experts. Among these programmes one of the best is iNaturalist where, once you’ve signed up for free, you can submit photos and other details and – if you’re lucky – an expert somewhere in the world will verify the name. I only say if you’re lucky because there are so many records, most referees don’t have time to verify really well known things. I tried familiarising myself with the app at the beginning by posting some extremely common plants and they languished unloved and unnoticed until I took them down. The best and fastest responses seem to come from groups like mycologists (fungi) or pteridologists (ferns) but if you’re posting a less well known plant the support is good. Another virtue of iNaturalist is that verified records find their way onto the national and international databases and can be used for research. Vice County Recorders mostly use a Windows programme called MapMate which was state of the art when it was designed, but hasn’t been supported and has apparently become a bit clunky.

Flora incognita, another freebie uses AI and gives a useful percentage figure for certainty; and there are more coming on to the market all the time and may suit your needs completely.Finally, for birders I can’t resist recommending Merlin. I was out on a trip with the Three Musketeers in the autumn and we all heard an unrecognised bird song coming from a dense hedge. We all pulled our phones out and then discovered that we were all using Merlin.; an American app that comes with add-on national databases.

But saving the best until last, often the very best support and advice comes from your (in the UK) local Vice County Recorder. If you join a natural history society you’re bound to meet them very quickly. They’re all volunteers and many of them act as referees for iNaturalist as well. Ultimately every record comes down, in the end, to human judgement. AI is good and getting better, but rather like Satnav it can let you down spectacularly if you don’t use your own judgement or tap into someone else’s.

So I seem to have slipped into writing about records. You may, of course, spend a lifetime finding beautiful plants, fungi, mosses and ferns purely for your own pleasure, but in this epoch of ecological crisis every single record – even of daisies and dandelions contributes to the global picture. Natural history is a field where volunteers make a huge contribution. We can’t all afford our own scanning electron microscopes and perform DNA analyses on the dining room table but we can observe and record so that the scientists with all that expensive kit can pore over the trends and direct their research towards the most pressing challenges. As Joni Mitchell has it – “You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.”

Will the real Cornwall please stand up!

Lizard Point

I was just adding up and I’m pretty sure our first visit to the Lizard would have been in 1969 while we were at Falmouth Art School. It must have made an impression because when we moved to Bath Academy of Art in Corsham we went back for three weeks, camping in a heavy cotton tent on a farm for 50p a night with access to an outdoor toilet and a cold tap in the corner of the farm garden for washing. The farmer was an amazingly good looking young man with blond curls who was experimenting with milking three times a day. We quickly got through the small amount of money I’d earned as a temporary groundsman and I had to phone my sister for some additional funds. The journey down began with a car drive to Penryn with a friend who was visiting her brother and then after an overnight stay we caught a series of buses beginning outside the Methodist Chapel where they were singing in tongues so loudly you could hear it through the three foot granite walls. We finally arrived in Lizard hours later, just in time for a snack in the Regent Cafe on the green (still there). For some reason I’d brought my little portable Remington and a coffee percolator (I didn’t type a word the whole time we were there!), and everything we needed was packed into two rucksacks; mine was so tall I could barely lean to one side without toppling.

I was determined to walk across to Kynance Cove to camp, but I was equally determined to navigate across the most direct route rather than follow the coast path. On sober reflection and more than fifty years later I understand that every mark on an OS map has a meaning. Not least the little wavy blue lines that signify some very rough and waterlogged ground. I had no idea then what botanical treasures we were stumbling across. We finally made it across Lizard Down in the dark having scrambled down and up the precipitous sides of a valley quite unnecessarily and erected the little yellow tent on the first bit of flattish and dryish ground we could find. In the morning Madame went for a wee behind a rock, having barely slept a wink for fear of being inundated by the sea which – although it was noisy, was 100 feet below us – only to be approached by a phalanx of bemused walkers. We’d pitched the tent in the middle of the coast path. Words were spoken and we packed up and walked the coast path back to Lizard.

The three weeks were blissfully hot and we walked and sunbathed all day, discovering the small villages, eating at the cafe when we got back from our explorations and drinking at the pub in the evening. On one occasion I tried to drink every whisky on the bar while Madame had her first taste of brandy and Babycham. It didn’t end well and I banged my head on a farm shed lintel so hard that I saw stars. On other evenings we really did see stars; millions of them.

This was the holiday we discovered Cadgwith. We stopped off in Ruan Minor and found a little pop up cafe doing cream teas in the garden, and then we walked on down to the Cove and – although I couldn’t swear to it – I think we probably bought fresh crab. Cornwall had been a revelation to us; both of us born and brought up in Bristol and, for the first time, seeing Dracaenas, (which were Palm Trees as far as we were concerned), growing everywhere. The sea there, after the familiar mud soaked grey brown of the Bristol Channel, was a miraculous blue. It was there I discovered the name of the exotic looking clifftop weed called Kaffir Fig. It was there too that we saw the last few Choughs eking out a living before becoming extinct for several decades. Intensive farming and chemical cattle drenches finally did for them and almost did for the Ravens too. It was there that two intertwining threads were born in us; a passion for natural history and a passion for this extraordinary part of Cornwall.

When we go back anywhere along that coast, the first thing I do is take in a great draught of the air; of the sea, the grass, the cowpats in the fields – not the ammoniac stench of huge silos but crusting there on the grass for flies to lay eggs which hatch into maggots which in turn feed the Choughs. The second thing I do is to pause and listen to the sea, the wind and then the birds. Jackdaws, Choughs, Rooks, Crows, Magpies and even Ravens if you’re lucky – they’re all such voluble chatterboxes. The Lizard is known as a botanical hotspot which, translated, means there are so many plants I don’t recognize and can’t name, that I exist with a permanently cricked neck and spend the evenings poring over books and photos. I’m a slow learner.

Then for some reason we stopped going there. It felt overrun with tourists not like us, and the ambivalence of the Cornish towards us was occasionally hard to bear. Too many Tarquins and Cressidas; too many labradors; too many wannabe sailors and posh wetsuits; too much Guinea Fowl and too many places we could no longer afford to eat; too many times being ignored in the bar whilst the barking classes sharp elbowed their way to the front.

We eventually had three boys and for most of the time life was a struggle but we found a wonderful and cheap campsite in the extreme west of Wales with amazing beaches that you could only access on foot after a long walk; and where we could go skinny dipping if we felt like it and build driftwood bonfires on the sand. The boys were happy there and soon found friends among the AT (alternative type) campers. It was like Totnes by the sea. On one occasion one of the other parents asked us if it was really true that we cleaned our teeth with twigs – the boys had rather exaggerated our commitment to low impact living.

I was learning plants more quickly by this time – making long lists of them as we walked down the lanes, whilst barely keeping my head above water at work. There were several occasions when I drove back home – a 300 mile round trip – to take a funeral in the middle of a holiday. I always felt responsible, but we survived the worst that a few of the church congregation felt entitled to throw at us and gradually they left to attend other churches where the vicar was more malleable and would do as they were told. Pastoral care for us was a joke, because the bishops felt threatened by therapeutic groups that might reveal abuse and bullying in the Church of England.

One lovely summer we took three weeks off and went camping in West Wales and by the end I felt like a wildly excited dog, charging around the field. I think that was when I realized that some jobs will crush the life out of you if you let them. There was me preaching about life in all its fullness and slowly fading away myself. That summer I let my beard grow and when we got back one of the congregation told me I looked frightening. I felt that was a good start.

But what about Cornwall? One summer after the boys had left home and we were both working full time we’d arranged and paid for a holiday in the South of France and needed to hire a car which you can’t do without a credit card. That’s so the hire company can remove hundreds of pounds from your account without asking you, on the spurious grounds that you didn’t refill the tank until the fuel ran over your shoes. Anyway, the credit card never arrived, the holiday and our money were lost and three weeks later the bank rang to say that they’d found the card in a drawer in the office. No word of apology or any offer of compensation. Madame was devastated and I felt responsible but she immediately started searching for a new holiday. Needless to say looking for a campsite in August is tricky but she stumbled on a long established campsite in Cornwall that had just changed hands, which had led to a bit of a boycott by the longstanding patrons. So we were in, and found our Cornish heaven again. We’d had a couple of damp squibs in the intervening years. One cottage near St Ives, owned by another vicar, turned out to have walls running with damp and squatting in a sea of mud. The tenants on the farm looked terrifyingly inbred and we drove straight home again before the banjos and shotguns came out.

The new campsite on the Roseland Peninsula was everything we needed and had its own microclimate with its own flora. But working eighty hours a week precludes any serious botanising apart from a few short holidays and so we had to wait until we both retired and moved to Bath before we could settle to some serious plant hunting. Nowadays we alternate between the Lizard, Portscatho and the Llyn peninsula for longer breaks and do local field trips with the Bath Nats where there are abundantly qualified members to help us identify plants and fungi, even insects sometimes.

Cornwall is a difficult place to get your head around. I’ve often written about my attraction to post-industrial landscapes, which the county offers in abundance. There’s barely a square mile that hasn’t been dug up, turned over and mined. A century later it all looks like a film set; ferns growing tastefully from the crumbling pitheads against the pyramid backdrop of china clay spoil heaps; footpaths glistening with mica flakes; cliffs stained blue and green with copper and arsenic leaking from flooded mine adits.

And then there are the fishing villages. Hardly anyone outside the big ports like Newlyn and Penzance goes fishing any more, apart from a few small day boats after mackerel, crab and lobster to sell through the back door – but the fishing myth persists in a miasma of half remembered better days. It’s kept alive because we all need it to be kept alive. What cottage or pub connects better with the imaginary past than the one with a few coloured glass floats and a brass barometer on the wall? In the winter the pretty villages empty out and go dark. Village schools, churches and shops close every year as the locals move to damp and poorly maintained rentals inland.

But we go back like lemmings to the edge of the sea every summer because we need to feed some remote part of the soul that can’t be fed anywhere else. We take our own soul food; a few folk songs, remembered paintings, some Leach pottery maybe – because the essence of twenty first century life; the high wall that keep us chained to neoliberal stupidity is the constant erosion of historical memory. Memories of the real past, like languages don’t just wither away, they’re deliberately suppressed and the resulting holes are filled with the polystyrene foam of costume drama on TV. Cornwall is Poldark; Poldark is Cornwall. Believe what you like! Truth is so last year! A bit of wrecking or piracy or smuggling is OK, after all it’s only a film!

I suppose for a botanist, even a very amateur one like me, it would be simpler to ignore all that stuff and just enjoy the plant life. But there is a live interface between, for instance, unemployment and a dirty industry like lithium mining. Polluted land might provide a niche interest for people like me, but it’s polluted all the same. In West Penwith there’s a battle raging between Natural England and some of the local farmers. There are about 3000 hectares of moor and downland that constitute one of the largest semi natural sites in the country. We’ve walked the footpaths there for years. But nutrient enrichment and changed land use towards intensive farming is slowly destroying the habitat. There’s more heat than light in the debate because the farmers will be compensated for any effect on their income, but there’s no doubt that the way of life they’ve become accustomed to for – say – fifty years, will have to change. That’s a toughie because a fifth generation farmer didn’t sign up to become a nature warden and very properly wants a bit more flesh on the bones of how it’s all going to work. The problem is, organic change is very slow and incremental but the environmental crisis is more akin to a tsunami. There’s no time for a generational change and some farmers there find it threatening and oppressive to be told their traditional way of life is less important than a tiny plant or a spider.

The Cornish, like most threatened communities, have become defensive and suspicious of the government. The fishing industry has been hammered by brexit whilst simultaneously overfishing because you have to make hay while the sun’s shining. Lack of housing is a huge source of anger – it goes on. Tourism is a constant irritant; there are too many buy to lets and airBnb’s and, just as with the tin mining, much of the money is exported to the wealthier parts of the UK.

And yet ……. and yet, when the beach side building that houses fishing gear in Cadgwith came onto the market, threatening the livelihood of the last few fishing boats, the local community launched an appeal which was supported by people all over the country and the building was saved.

When we are there my greatest joy is to stand at the kitchen door of our rented National Trust cottage – in truth an otherwise derelict cattle shed – and absorb the smell and plangent sound of the sea against the rocks below. I don’t need to own it, or control it in any way. The thought of it just being there is a sustaining one when the going gets tough in Bath. A week is all it takes to fill the tank, and we’ll come home with dozens of photographs and maybe identify some never seen before (by us) plants, oh and we’ll eat fresh fish from the fishmonger in Porthleven, drink wine, sleep like innocents and feel the life running through our veins.

If there is a solution to the conundrum to the disconnect between real Cornwall and the competing fantasy versions, it will surely include tourists like us; but let’s make it sustainable tourism, buying locally to support small businesses, parking thoughtfully without blocking the lanes and respecting those who live there the year round. Let’s support any initiatives to bring sustainable non-polluting green jobs to the county and behave like ethical grownups!

Camino 13 : Puy lentils and confit duck

Sénergues

28th May 2010

Woke up feeling cold, miserable and pessimistic.  My feet had been sore all night and I couldn’t seem to get comfortable.  Dragged myself out of the sleeping bag and went for a shower while M slept.  Then I had a proper look at my feet and peeled off the pile of three compeed plasters on the ball of my right foot.  To my surprise – though the plasters stank – the skin was intact so I replaced them with a new one which was much more comfortable.  M woke in a more positive frame of mind and we packed up and blagged a couple of free coffees at the campsite café.  Walk was much easier today. Arrived in Sénergues at 12.00 (didn’t leave camp ‘till 9.00 and found 2 pilgrims we recognized eating lunch at a café. It looked so good we stopped too.  Green salad, fresh tomato, hard boiled egg, confit duck and hot cooked Puy lentils.  We both had a panaché and then sorbet and espresso. Cost 30€ but it made up for yesterday’s privations.  Walked on new legs after lunch.  Finally got to Conques at about 4.00pm. Town is extraordinary – like a medieval film set – so we decided to take a day off tomorrow and explore then. 

Campsite by river – nice place – Pizzas tonight + sleep + rest and do some washing.  Only fly in ointment is 50 school kids on adventure camp.   Hope they don’t stay up all night.

Journal

Surprisingly, perhaps, I didn’t come back from France with a pocketful of recipes – mainly because our diet was so restricted by our budget and although we saw a lot of menus we didn’t really eat them. I wrote last time about the vegetable soup with aligot and local sausages. The vegetable soup has eluded any attempt to cook it myself and although we eat lots of veg soup at the Potwell Inn, I’ve never made anything as good. Maybe it should only be attempted when you’re half starved and completely exhausted. We were living off high energy tinned food that we could eat as we walked a lot of the time. Later on I’ll come to a cafe where I was so lonely I could have proposed to the owner on the spot except for her completely aloof manner (very French) and around a forty year age gap. I was missing Madame terribly.

But this little restaurant in Sénergues looked like the real deal and when we saw a couple we vaguely knew we didn’t hesitate. The main course was a kind of warm salad of confit duck and Puy lentils with a green salad. This one has become a mainstay for us. We buy the duck legs when they’re on offer and brine them overnight before preparing the confit from an enormous jar of duck fat at the back of the fridge and then pack them into our largest and deepest casserole with a few bay leaves and some thyme before we cook them very very slowly for several hours. Then we vacpack them in pairs and bung them into the freezer. We cook the lentil salad fresh each time – a mirepoix / soffritto of carrot and celery and a whole onion stuck with a few cloves, covered with stock (best you can get – preferably homemade) and dressed with a vinaigrette made from red wine vinegar, honey, chopped fresh shallot and chopped parsley. Green salad any way you like it. we defrost the confit duck and sauté until crisp and warmed right through. Then we usually pull the meat from the bones and mix it with the lentils – absolutely lovely to eat and easy to cook. Here begins and ends my Camino cookbook. As for tinned cassoulet it’s better heated up because the layer of cold goose fat cleaves to the top of your mouth in a most unpleasant way. I could retch just remembering it! However real cassoulet, whilst a terrible faff is a thing of beauty that doesn’t cost much more than a day of your life.

The changing of blister plasters became something of a ritual for us. Although I’d prepared and trained, as well as pickling my feet with surgical spirit for weeks, both of us suffered from really painful blisters, and we found that the best way of dealing with them was to dress, clean up and apply Compeed plasters to each others’ feet. An intimate and smelly job but much easier in the end for both of us. I don’t use this blog to promote anything – but I can honestly say that Compeed plasters are the absolute bees knees and can keep you walking with absurdly blistered feet. Perhaps I’d venture the advice that the time to deal with any soreness on a long walk, is immediately.

Next stop Conques.

Conques

Camino 4 – Monistrol d’Allier

20th May 2010 ctd:

Monster monster day.  Crossed over a big ridge to Monistrol d’Allier where we found an unlikely Englishman called Peter running a restaurant.  Couldn’t stop him chatting. Had a coffee and a triangular toasted sandwich – the machine for which he hopes to sell in Korea (!) –filling was made from last night’s leftovers gratin dauphinoise, bits of dry cured ham and cheese sealed in a kind of crêpe.

Journal

This is becoming quite a chastening exercise because every bit of the journey I read back in the contemporary notes comes to me with extras I didn’t recall at the time – like the fact that Peter the proprietor of the hotel and restaurant brought out a wooden board with a lump of local sausage, olives and a large hunting knife for us to help ourselves as he (mostly he) talked. I got the impression he was quite isolated and rather lonely since his wife and, I think, daughter were away somewhere. I couldn’t resist this photo – “Poseur,” apart from the English loanword meaning, meant something like installer, and I wonder if it referred to houses built for the workers building the SNCR railway track from Paris down to Nice. If you drive rather than walk out of Monistrol d’Allier, you follow the railway line which looks incredibly scenic. The trains were still running infrequently a few years ago and there was a ticket that allowed passengers to get on and off as frequently as they liked. It’s a journey I’d still love to make. According to the Cicerone guide there’s a campsite where we stayed next to the river but I can’t remember anything about it.

Some years later, Madame and I retraced as much of the route as we could in our little Hyundai i10 and we stopped off at Monistrol to spend a night at the same hotel. Peter the owner was still there and at supper he walked through to the kitchen with a big tray of freshly picked bright yellow girolles. They would have cost £50 at the market. Our room was spartan – like student accommodation – but on checking it just now it seems to have gone a bit more upmarket these days, although I don’t think the Korean toasties had taken off. There’s really nothing much to see in Monistrol; Madame vowed never to return, and I didn’t argue.

You get some idea of the terrain we were getting ourselves into from the photos below. The warning below them , which we hadn’t properly embraced, was in the indispensable Cicerone guide “The way of St James”. More on that tomorrow with a bit of luck.

I haven’t been spending all my time on writing up the Camino; we’ve also been incredibly busy on the allotment and tomorrow we’re back off to the Bannau (Brecon Beacons) to spend a couple of days with our friends. Hopefully we’ll have time to put out the moth trap and see some of the spectacular moths you can find there, even at 1000 feet – and the fungus season is cranking up nicely although a large box of girolles is probably not going to happen. Looking at the Camino photos the Aubrac hills, although they’re closer to 4000 feet, aren’t dissimilar.

This was only the second day of our walk but even by then we were beginning to realize the scale of the effort we’d be needing to make. Our rucksacks were back breakingly heavy and none of the training walks had been anywhere near the level of difficulty we were now attempting. Somewhere on one of my dead laptops there’s a spreadsheet with the weight of every single item we were taking – all neatly added up. On the night we actually packed them we weighed them on the bathroom scales and the rucksacks were around 5 kilos heavier – a powerful incentive to send some of the kit back to the UK. Individually the kit was as close to state of the art as we could afford; all of it – from bivvy mats, sleeping bags to quick drying clothes, overtrousers and raincoats, super lightweight – it rains a lot up there in the spring. Looking back, was it really necessary to take a spare pair of shoes? Two cameras rather than one? – the list of errors went on. But there’s a reason for it all that hid under the radar as I was planning, because I’m a bit of a hobbit – I believe I need my familiar objects around me.

I suppose most people would say – off the top of their heads – that the object of a pilgrimage is to get to the destination; the holy place at the end of the rainbow. But for me the essence of the enterprise is to embrace vulnerability. For me, not knowing where I’m going to sleep or eat each night is extremely challenging. Not knowing what the next day will involve or where I’ll finish up; not speaking the language very well; not knowing what we would do if ( as happened several times) when we arrived at the campsite, it was closed and locked, or all the shops shut. I could never come out of a period of vulnerability feeling smug or spiritual; just exhausted, wary and fearful but strangely exhilarated and open, with all my senses on steroids. There’s a clarity of thinking that comes alongside vulnerability. The dead hand of my scripted future is swept aside. One of the notes I found in the notebook today that didn’t find its way into the typed transcript was this –

My worst fear would be that my life would turn out to be a quotation from somebody else’s

Journal

Advice for bloggers. There’s always the shop that sells expensive notebooks and watercolour paint

Sunset, looking west across the northern tip of Ramsey Island

That’s certainly true in Bath where you can easily spend over £100 on a posh notebook and fountain pen and release your inner Jane Austen during the length of a single rainy day.

I write – as ever – of myself; and my inner Jane Austen who remains captive in spite of the deskloads of notepaper and must-have pens which I’ve bought over the years to no effect at all. Even a set of six French manufactured coloured inks failed to remove the large stone rolled in front of the creative sepulchre.

For a while I convinced myself that it was the sheer expense of these accessories that was holding me back and so I started writing on torn up sheets of absorbent lining paper. There you go! we all have our little rituals which – although they have no impact at all on what we write – are strangely enabling of the act itself. John Masefield apparently liked to write with a box of rotting apples under his chair and Stanley Spencer memorably enjoyed the smell of human poo which seemed to get his creative juices going. Not for me, thanks. The seaside, with its smells of tar, salt and suntan lotion usually does it for me but these days I eschew all the tics of the past and write on my Chromebook wherever I happen to be.

For ten years I taught creative writing in the Welsh Valleys and in a notorious outer urban fringe estate, and it was there I learned that absolutely anyone can write. If there’s a problem it doesn’t lay with the (worker) writers but with the education system and the publishing business that sets the parameters of what we’re allowed to experience, think or express in writing. Of course the greatest enemy of many writers is self-doubt, but again this has its good side. Words don’t often come easily and it’s no bad thing to hesitate before putting your turds of wisdom before the public at large.

My own approach to writing was developed by having to meet deadlines. When you’ve got a deadline – even a self imposed one – you can forget all the faff and self delusion about waiting to feel the creative flow before committing. Sit down, turn on the laptop, write something and as it emerges you can correct, revise and edit as you go along. Oh and although it’s a good idea to have some thoughts on your potential audience, don’t let that be a straightjacket. In a blog format like this you can write for more than one audience and hope that some readers will like a bit of green spirituality as well as gardening tips. Never be afraid of pissing your followers off by failing to pander to their prejudices. You win some. And don’t pay too much attention to blogging advice on how to monetize your pages or get more hits. If you make the audience king you’ll land up being a servant.

For years I’ve honed my technique to deliver around a thousand words of reasonably stimulating, challenging ideas, backed up by experience and a lot of hard reading. What I haven’t learned is the very different skill set of gathering and editing those ten minute pieces into a larger format. Developing the significant themes into theses requires a larger view and a longer focus than I’m used to working with.

So we’re taking a two week post-harvest break in the campervan near St Davids, overlooking Ramsey Sound, and with a weather forecast that only differs in the predicted intensity of the rain for the next fourteen days. What could be better than repurposing some of that reading time to try out a larger format – say 10,000 words long? Well, coincidentally I packed Robert Graves’ “The White Goddess” to re-read, and this morning I made a start on it. Apart from his poetry and the book I have a single point of contact with him because I took the funeral service for a woman in his Majorcan circle who typed up some of the draft copies of the “White Goddess”. By the time I got to meet her she was near to death and not going gentle into that good night. Not that she ever spoke, but she was passing restlessly into unconsciousness. I sat with her daughter as her mother lay dying and asked the obvious question – “Why don’t you read her some poetry?” She was aghast at the very thought. Her mother – who sounded like a real martinet had always hated and criticised the way that her daughter read poetry aloud. Cue for a lifetime of repressed longing for someone, anyone, to offer any small praise.

As I started to read the book again I couldn’t get that picture out of my mind. Graves comes across as a slightly paranoid, obsessive old monster; absolutely determined to have his say and drive his point home like a stake through the heart. It’s my way or the highway. Anyway I soldiered on through the introduction and eventually found an example of an old Welsh poetic form called Cynghanedd that Graves had written to illustrate what he calls a “burdensome obsession”. I thought it was an absolutely wonderful use of words:

Billet spied,

Bolt sped.

Across fields

Crows fled,

Aloft, wounded

Left one dead

Robert Graves in a footnote in “The White Goddess”

That’s a wonderful encouragement to be bold with words; but the real takeaway point is that in his eagerness to press home every single obsessive point by wrestling it into the ground, Graves managed to write what even he thought was a difficult book that would be completely unintelligible to the “stupid and silly” people who would never be able to understand – because they weren’t proper poets. That should be a warning to anyone attempting to write in longer forms. Good writing flows like a river not a stream with prostate problems, and being right will in no way protect us from being bad.

Harvesting the Borlotti Beans II

Well, one unexpected outcome of the two recent heatwaves was that the Borlotti – obviously thinking the game was up – set their pods, fattened up their beans and expired. The leaves went from healthy green to pallid yellow in a couple of days, and that was that; an early harvest was forced upon us. The pods look a little shorter than usual, but all things considered it seems to be a decent crop. In fact one of this year’s features will probably be an early clearance of many of the beds. There’s a subtle difference between picking and harvesting and given that we intend to dry and store the whole crop we would definitely describe it as harvesting over and against picking the runner beans. Naturally we pick a few of the Borlotti as soon as they begin to fatten up and eat them raw off the vines; rich and earthy. We move the harvested beans, pods and all, into the greenhouse in mushroom trays, where they can dry out of the way of any rain; and then we’ll shell them, dry them a little more in the oven on a very low temperature, and then pack them into kilner jars away from the attention of any moths. A couple of seasons ago we stored them carelessly and lost about half a kilo of beans to small grubs. Of course we could buy them in packets from the supermarket but once you’ve grown your own, soaked and cooked them you’ll never accept anything less – they’re just so delicious and creamy.

The other plants that have come in early are the tomatoes in the polytunnel. We picked another 20Kg this morning and spent the rest of the day in the kitchen prepping them for oven roasted passata. The aubergines have suddenly started fruiting as well and so we’re in the happy position of enjoying the summer glut a couple of weeks earlier than usual. In fact nearly all the crops are doing pretty well considering the continuing drought. There are some pictures at the bottom of this post.

Is all this fecundity in the midst of a drought down to no-dig, plentiful compost and keeping all the beds covered with growing plants? It’s difficult to say for sure but our allotment neighbours who prefer a more regimented, clean soil policy, seem to have suffered more. Messy allotments keep their soil moist much longer.

The trail cam has captured a couple of badgers mooching about looking for sweetcorn recently, and we’ve seen a fox, numerous mice climbing the Calendulas to eat the seeds and a domestic cat. Overwhelmingly, though, the camera has filmed the intense activity on a clump of Nepeta – Catmint – with all manner of insects visiting during the day, and a variety of moths at night. The concerted effort to attract more wildlife and pollinators has been a great success and this last week a young half-fledged robin has taken to coming into the polytunnel with us, sitting quite confidently on a tub and darting down to catch insects and worms.

The annual battle to save the sweetcorn from badgers is in full swing now, and we’ve surrounded our small patch with sheep wire and soft mesh in the hope of keeping them out.

One further point that may be worth noting is that after growing numerous varieties of garlic over the years we’ve come to the conclusion that Carcassonne Wight enjoys our ground better than any of the others – and so I think we’ll concentrate on growing that variety in future. There’s much more to write about, including a trip to Birmingham to celebrate Madame’s birthday and a visit to Carter’s Steam Fair which bookended a day entirely lost to sedation after a routine trip to the hospital for an endoscope which apparently revealed nothing much too wrong – but all of that can wait for now because we’re both exhausted and completely tomatoed out !!

The best of times and the worst of times

But first the blokey propellerhead stuff

I take back all I said about our trip train across Snowdonia. I thought we would be pulled by a diesel but to our (my) great delight the engine that hauled us over 25 miles and 600 feet in vertical gain at Rhyd Ddu was the strangest beast I’ve ever seen – an NG16 Garratt built in Manchester in 1935 for South African Railways and designed for working very similar routes there. It certainly isn’t beautiful in the conventional sense – a bit of a mule in fact, but as tough as old boots. What’s odd about it is that it’s really two engines spliced together and sharing a boiler. If you look at the photo you’ll see a completely unexpected set of pistons and connecting rods at the back, under the tender. The engine was actually in service until 1985. Predictably, when we pulled in to Caernarfon station a large gathering of faintly priapic men – including me – rushed to the front of the train to take photographs. For the truly lost, the engine is described as a 2-6-2+2-6-2T NGG16 Garratt Design, built by Beyer Peacock Ltd. The bit that I loved is that this arrangement – known as a double bogey setup, allows the engine to be twice the power of the more familiar single bogey and it also allows the engine to traverse sharp bends on the mountain terrain by sashaying around the corners. The front and rear bogeys both pivot around the boiler section allowing a snake-like movement

For the human bit, being towed 600 feet up a winding narrow gauge railway line, surrounded by mountains, rivers and lakes, and listening to the sound of the engine working hard and clattering over modern steel bridges; seeing smoke and steam flying past in streamers like shoals of translucent fish – was a profound blast of memories for me – my father was a railwayman for his whole working life.

Coming down from the highest point towards Caernarfon

Madame thinks the reflections of the window on the photo look like the ghostly outline of an industrial landscape. The line was commenced in 1832; just a year after the Bristol riots and at that time much of Snowdonia really was an industrial site. Reform was in the air as the aftershocks of the French revolution reverberated around Europe. The railway company bought its first steam engines in 1856, just three years before Charles Dickens published “A Tale of Two Cities”, whose opening lines popped into my head as I was writing:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities

There’s a reason I love writing these cats cradles of association. Steam engines, railway companies, slate mines, coal and copper extraction and even – very near where we’re staying at the moment – one of the world’s largest manganese mines, back in the day – are all the visible inscription of our human impact on the landscape. The landscape and its artifacts – to put it in posh terms – is a palimpsest; written on, erased and re-used, sometimes over millennia. I was unable to shake off the difficult feeling that even the steam engine that pulled our train, was somehow implicated in our colonial rule over South Africa. Life is complicated – that’s what makes it so interesting and challenging.

The remains of a manganese mine on Rhiw

Anyway – to get back to the day-trip, It was raining in the way that only Wales rains when we arrived at Porthmadog station. The temperature had barely crept above 10C and it was sheeting down in curtains driven by the gale. The railway has a permanent staff, but many of the jobs are filled by volunteers who do a wonderful job, and whose absolute loyalty and commitment manifests itself in a slightly religious attitude; so perhaps I should explain that by saying that there were times when we were checking in, that we felt as if we were entering a much loved Anglican church with the average age of the congregation creeping towards threescore years and ten. I was asked half a dozen times whether we were travelling first class or standard class; a denomination that was confirmed when we climbed aboard and found that the heating wasn’t working. This oh-so British class distinction was amplified by the fact that our standard class carriage was embossed (in gold lettering) third class on the outside, and the bewildering choice of hampers that someone had filled with their idiosyncratic vision of what constituted luxury and what ordinary should be. The net result of all these references to class was to make everyone feel slightly uncomfortable – like a first date confronted by a ten page wine list.

On a mountain, the rain doesn’t hang about for long – and so everywhere we looked there were waterfalls and ad hoc spouts bursting from the hillsides and flowing down increasingly dangerous looking whitewater races. The track was shallowly underwater near the Aberglasyn tunnels and alongside, the Afon Glaslyn was raging. It was if an entire mountain range had sprung a leak. As we reached the top at Rhyd Ddu, the water ceased flowing towards Porthmadog and started afresh making for Caernarfon with equal ferocity. The peaks, of course, were obscured by the rain and mist and so we only caught the merest glimpse of the Snowdon summit. The journey last about two and a half hours each way and by the time we reached Caernarfon we were thoroughly cold. Some of our travelling companions had put their waterproof trousers on to keep warm.

If anything the rain was even worse in Caernarfon and, waterproofed to the teeth, we made a desultory tour of the town centre. Madame unhelpfully suggested I take off the broad brimmed hat I was wearing and use the hood from my waterproof jacket. It was good advice but imperfectly timed because when I pulled the hood over my head, the icy water it contained ran down my neck and inside my shirt. There wasn’t much going on in the town centre – a couple of drug dealers in the square; a solitary prostitute and a lot of tourists huddling in doorways. If charity shops or bookies were your thing you’d have been in heaven.

Does this sound like a bad Tripadvisor review? Well it’s not, because I love Wales and what’s happened in these once great towns and cities is an absolute scandal. Wales was one of the first English colonies and has, for centuries, had the marrow extracted and taken away by the wealthy. Everywhere there are signs in Welsh reading no more second homes – but I would say to the pamphleteers – what if the tourists stayed away? what if the profitable conversion work that keeps builders, electricians and plumbers in work – what if it all ended? what would that do to a local economy that’s on its knees already. What Wales needs is vision and freedom. Freedom for local councils to borrow money and build the thousands of low cost homes that are needed so the young and gifted don’t all have to leave the neighbourhoods they’ve grown up in. Then – by all means restrict second homes and end the tax breaks because there will still be abundant work for the tradespeople. Then give the councils powers and finance to support startups and to develop the kind of tourist related attractions that will bring visitors in.

Caernarfon is the depressing sign of a conservation approach to planning. Just like many of the local farms struggling to survive – what’s needed is not conservation but regeneration. A planning system that values wooden sash windows and slate roofs above apprenticeships and skilled work is on the slippery slope to extinction. Am I sounding like William Cobbett here. He was a rabid old pamphleteer whose book “Rural Rides” has always been a lodestone for me; telling it like it is , or rather was, when it was published in 1853 – there’s a coincidence!

After a fruitless hour in the rain we went back to the station cafe to get warm, and were gradually joined by a throng of sodden passengers all dreading the journey home. Madame overheard one person trying to arrange a taxi. We managed to get back onto the train half an hour before the off and found to our absolute delight that the heating was working – and so the journey home was doubly pleasurable despite the turkish bath atmosphere.

Sadly, though, on the return Madame overheard a depressing conversation between three young women in their twenties discussing their attitude towards the police following the murder of Sarah Everard. It really shows how constricted and intimidated women are in this deeply defective culture. Enough, though. We love these day trips and no matter how uncomfortable the transport and lousy the weather we always come back feeling challenged and energised; and enough material to draw and paint and write for a month.

Four hundred and fifty three thousand, seven hundred and forty four

No it’s not a telephone number, that’s how many words I’ve written on this blog – I mean, it’s a lot, even spread across 585 posts, and I’m aware that it’s a bit intimidating too. I suppose you could read it every day, in which case it would be like a sequential diary, but most people don’t, and only pick up on a particular search term that they’re especially interested in. I’m not sure what you’d call it because the bigger it gets the harder it is to search. So in the midst of a somewhat sleepless night it occurred to me to make a kind of pot luck offer in a tag cloud. You can click on any of the tags and see what’s behind it; pick a favourite topic or just have a random meander around the inside of my head – there’s plenty of social distancing space there; and search for your particular silver threepenny bit in the plum pudding.

asparagus autumn Camino campervan repairs climate change climate emergency composting covid 19 deep ecology economic collapse environment environmental catastrophe environmental crisis field botany foraging Fungi garden pests global climate crisis global heating green spirituality herbal medicine intensive farming locally sourcing lockdown macro photography meditation no-dig pickling and preserving pilgrimage polytunnels preserving raised beds rats regenerative farming rewilding Sourdough species extinctions spring technology urban ecology urban wildlife walking water storage weeds wildflower meadows

Ichabod

This is a long post and it’s possibly more open about some fairly personal stuff than you may feel interested enough to read. It deals with the challenges of retirement and the emotional impact of health problems. Normal service will, I promise, be resumed immediately so if you skip this one that’s fine, but it’s here in case anyone else might find it helpful.

I was maybe fourteen years old when I first read this passage and allowed it to take up residence in my mind, along with Peggoty and Duffy Clayton (you’ll have to look that one up).

“A month later a leisurely and dusty tramp, plump equatorially and
slightly bald, with his hands in his pockets and his lips puckered to
a contemplative whistle, strolled along the river bank between
Uppingdon and Potwell. It was a profusely budding spring day and
greens such as God had never permitted in the world before in human
memory (though indeed they come every year), were mirrored vividly in
a mirror of equally unprecedented brown. For a time the wanderer
stopped and stood still, and even the thin whistle died away from his
lips as he watched a water vole run to and fro upon a little headland
across the stream. The vole plopped into the water and swam and dived
and only when the last ring of its disturbance had vanished did Mr.
Polly resume his thoughtful course to nowhere in particular”

The History of Mr Polly – H G Wells

It was always going to be a bit of a culture shock, coming back to Bath after ten days in the most idyllic and secluded place you could imagine, overlooking the Irish Sea in North Wales; and in the way that astrologers write about trines, and other unusual alignments of the planets and astronomers plot eclipses and consequential movements of the planets; my own little solar system threw up a large spanner in the form of an anniversary. In fact the fifth anniversary of my retirement.

I remember asking my old friend Mags, whose partner had retired three years previously, how long it had taken for her to settle. The answer – “three years at least” took me by surprise – I’d come to think of my retirement in rather conventional terms, you know – big party; warm words (mostly exaggerated); a few glasses and off into the sunset and a new life – just like Mr Polly. Then Rose, another friend, warned us that one of the biggest perils was that every night became Friday night. They were both right but both underestimated the length of time it would take for the dream of my/our retirement fantasies to morph into a much deeper reality.

On Monday last, (a beautiful late summer’s day), we drove across the mountains once more and six hours later arrived home. Nothing had happened particularly in the meanwhile: the flat hadn’t burned down and the allotment was pretty much as we’d left it; but the city – lying in its natural basin – was airless, thronged with visitors taking a chance with COVID; students moving towards their new independent lives, armed with implausibly large amounts of alcohol and – of course – the Easy Jet planes were overhead, bringing Typhoid Mary and her mates back from their holidays. Ambulances as always were crawling through the traffic, setting out from and returning to the Royal United Hospital.

One thing however was very different. A large stretch of the river had drained by a depth of about five feet – due to a problem with one of the sluices – and dozens of boats, some of them peoples’ homes, had dropped, one-sidedly, on their mooring ropes and filled with filthy water. This much photographed riverside area, worth millions to property developers began to look like a 1970’s photo of the old Caldon branch of the Trent and Mersey Canal; cluttered with abandoned and stolen metalwork – bikes, a stolen motorcycle, dozens of supermarket trolleys, old computers and general rubbish….. Hm!

The bottom right photograph (just about) shows the rarely seen overflow from the hot springs that drains warm water into the river after passing through the official Roman Baths and also through the rather expensive and privately run Spa. All the newly exposed river bed needed was a few dead dogs and Morris 1000 complete with skeletal passengers to complete the dystopian vision.

So what to do? Snowdonia ached in our memories and we were facing an enforced desensitisation back into our normal lives; living like urban foxes, avoiding unnecessary human contact and constantly COVID watchful. Plato said that the city is a work of art, but then he was a relatively wealthy and well educated man who probably lived in the better part of town. While Bath is, doubtless, a work of art – it’s more Bosch than Leonardo. The city looks great on a sunny evening when you’ve come in a coach and the buildings glow like ripe apricot as you are driven along London Road and back up to the motorway; but living here is very different.

Enough! We’ve forged our lives here now – I chose the word carefully – and much of the time our lives are so full we hardly notice all this. A therapeutic trip to the allotment surprised us. The first of the parsnips was a giant, the chillies, peppers and aubergines had all flourished in the days of our neglect. Another 5 kilos of tomatoes to prep, chillies to brine and ferment and more good things to eat. All good news there.

Our re-entry strategy was to revisit our favourite walks. The local ones are all calculated take us around the quiet edges of the city; be around five miles long, and capable of being taken at a bit of a challenging pace. There are no walks here that don’t involve hills.

To put all this exercise in some kind of context we both finished the first lockdown seriously overweight – my bread baking was probably the engine of much of it, but being indoors so long didn’t help, and comfort food was our principal survival mechanism. But there was more – Madame had endured a knee replacement; we’d both scored badly on blood glucose (pre diabetic) in the last set of tests and I’d had a series of troubling encounters with endoscopes, followed by a separate diagnosis of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. My heart would go into uncontrolled pointless and ineffectual racing leaving me feeling faint and (so I discovered) very likely to have a stroke or a heart attack. Our visits to the gym were more dangerous than I’d ever realized.

My medical issues were quickly resolved by medication to control the wayward heart rhythms and reduce my blood pressure, but emotionally the effect was deeper and more difficult to budge. Looking back, I began to make accommodations, telling myself it was only natural to slow down at my age, and all that blah blah blah. Fear of becoming a wreck was making things worse, and introducing negative feedback can only go one way, putting the brakes on life. We were shrinking in ambition even while we grew slower and bigger and so we did something about it. Long before the lockdown; we gave up alcohol – it’s fourteen months now with no more seven Friday nights a week and – (this is not a nag) – after a few months we felt so much better it was difficult to understand why we hadn’t done it sooner. Some of the worrying symptoms disappeared, and then six weeks ago we put ourselves on a low carb diet; I lost 20lbs and all my other stats – blood glucose, blood pressure, body fat, BMI and resting heart rate dropped quickly into the normal or even optimal levels. After a lifetime of never listening to good advice we bit the bullet and it worked. The diet is demanding but we soon got used to it. One of the biggest obstacles was getting past the pharmacists who seemed to think it was wrong for me to check my own blood sugars in case I “wore my finger out” taking samples, or (more likely) was too stupid to get medical help if self-testing showed up a problem.

The rescued sculpture in M’s farmyard

But accompanying the appearance of these promising new shoots; the reappearance of my waist, and the clothes I never thought I’d ever be able to wear again, there was something else lurking in the background that came so from from left-field it knocked me flat because the way in which the inner world inflects our experience of the outer world is always present whether we notice it or not. The dystopian experience of coming home from the unsustainable idyll should have been a warning that something needed sorting.

So we took the campervan for its annual MOT at a garage in one of my old parishes and while we waited I thought we’d drive around for a while, near some of the places we’d both loved during the time we lived there. We turned off up a narrow lane from the main road for no reason that I could explain and then in a moment of completely clear insight I knew two things. Firstly that I’d been trying to forget, to push to the back of my mind, the whole 25 years of work in the parish, although much of it was pure joy, because there were some bits of it that had been terrible and that had inflicted real damage on me. But the second insight was that it was OK to own all the good things. I needed to remember them safely because they represented a third of my life. So two insights in a narrow lane that (who’d have thought it?) led directly to a farm and to someone who’d been good to me in a completely unaffected way, and we banged on the door and were welcomed as old friends.

A lot of my life has been taken up with unravelling birds’ nests of memories. We say casually that so-and-so ‘was in pieces‘ and that’s often truer than we think. Years of helping other people to put their lives back together demanded that I took my own puzzle just as seriously – it’s a work in progress, you might say.

Anyway that could be the longest imaginable introduction to a couple of walks – one of them a restorative stroll around Bannerdown where we were delighted by two usurpers, both probably garden escapes but Michaelmas daisies are so much a part of autumn, and the Canadian goldenrod was just as pretty, neither of them the least rare or even genuine native wildflowers but hey! The real ram-stamped native was the plant gall known colloquially as a robin’s pincushion.

Then yesterday we went across to the Mendips to walk down the length of Velvet Bottom and instead of turning back up the Longwood Valley, we carried on down through the Black Rock nature reserve as far as Cheddar Gorge – who could resist those names? I’ve talked a lot about the peculiar geology of the place which, due to lead pollution from mines that have been operated since Roman times, has its own very specialised flora. I’ve written about it, but some of the plants are harder to spot than you’d think. Not, however meadow saffron – sometimes known as ‘naked ladies’ because the spectacular flowers appear after the seeds have been set and the leaves have disappeared for the winter.

Meadow saffron -now a two star rarity but once almost ubiquitous in wildflower meadows

And there’s another reason for writing at such length. I once taught a young South Wales man doing an incredibly long prison sentence for affray. He used to joke and say that if I crossed him he might have ‘one of his blackouts’. Let’s call him Owen. Apart from a gift for throwing furniture and televisions through windows, he knew more about Romano British settlements in South Wales than anyone I’ve ever met. If anyone ever demonstrated the fact that you can’t stuff a real life into a bag marked ‘historian’ or ‘botanist’ it was Owen. As Stephen Blackpool was inclined to say in “Hard Times” – ‘it’s all a muddle’ – and in real life, as opposed to the relentlessly (artificial) successful and happy bloggers’ persona, for every meadow saffron there’s an awful lot of ragwort that can’t be swept under the carpet. The Potwell Inn remains committed to life in all its fullness, richness and joy – allowing for the fact that some idiot could leave the sluices open at any time.

How to survive the storm

00000portrait_00000_burst202002061251069241773228647307606034.jpgI get all sorts of odd news stories chosen for me by the Google algorithm, alongside invitations to join dating sites. I always pass on the ‘looking for love’ ones because I made it a rule of life never to inflame an appetite I’m not in a position to gratify.  It probably sounds glum but it’s kept me out of all sorts of trouble. 

The news selections that most often catch my eye are the ones that involve farming. I suppose the all-seeing-eye has noticed my occasional forays into the trade press – as I try to find out what farmers think.  Having spent 25 years working in rural parishes I think I know that they’re feeling very put-upon, depressed and aggrieved at they way they’re being treated. Yesterday there was a report on a farming conference in Tipperary where a speaker (a professor of public health) claimed that Irish farmers were not being given due credit for the amount of carbon being stored in hedges.  Hedges, he claimed, are more effective carbon sinks than trees. 

The farmers, unsurprisingly fell on this tasty morsel of good news with glee.  “Look”, they said, “you can hardly move for hedges on our farms, we’re saving the earth already – go and blame someone else”.  It didn’t take long before another speaker popped the bubble and pointed out that farmers are in any case still grubbing out hedges by the mile, and that there is no evidence – scientific evidence that is – that has established whether hedges do or don’t store more carbon. The audience promptly turned a bit sour on him and told him they’d had enough of experts and so they’d continue to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds.  

Hedges are a brilliant idea for all sorts of reasons – not least for wildlife – so I’m all in favour of them, but there’s really no way out of this crisis that will allow farming to carry on exactly as it has done since the last war. 

So I was reading this story and – for no obvious reason – Elizabeth Kubler Ross popped into my mind. I was once a devoted fan of Kubler Ross – to be honest, anything that offers any real help in dealing with the awful pain of bereavement feels worth a try when you’re working with grieving people.  My problem with it was that real people didn’t seem to progress through the stages in quite the orderly way the original training suggested. All my experience (I wasn’t alone by the way) suggested that the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance certainly all certainly happened during the process but had to be treated more as modes of grieving that could occur singly or simultaneously, and which could be returned to in any order, sometimes many times. There was rarely a lasting moment of acceptance first time around; for most people grief came in waves and flashbacks, and healing was slow and painful.

What’s this got to do with a farming conference in Tipperary? Well, I think that farmers are suffering from real grief. Yes I know that environmental protestors are suffering from grief as well, but grieving isn’t helped by favouring one groups’ suffering over another. Farmers across the UK have been feted for decades for producing cheaper and more plentiful food and now they find themselves treated as villains.  They’ve done exactly what was asked of them, sometimes against their better instincts. There’s only been one show in town, and that was intensive, chemically driven, labour reduced farming. Many thousands have gone to the wall but some have become wealthy on subsidies. Then suddenly it’s all over. The climate crisis is everywhere in the news, the farmers are being blamed although they’re only one part of the problem and with the changes in the subsidy system many marginal farms may collapse. A whole way of life is dying in front of us and all too often we environmentalists harden our hearts and instead of offering a hand of friendship we shout that the means are justified by the end, and imply that they deserve nothing better. 

Which takes me on to the protesters who are also grieving for a dying world and in consequence are also displaying symptoms of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance- and again, although not in that tidy order. 

I always found that Kubler Ross was most useful when I was able to say to people that all five stages were normal. What most people expect when they’re grieving is that they will be depressed – maybe for a long time – but that gradually things will get better. What they don’t expect is that one minute they’ll swear they misheard and actually the doctor said there was nothing to worry about, and in the next minute be angry and then paralysed with depression for days, or promise faithfully that they’ll give up smoking or whatever – this is all normal grieving behaviour.

img_20200206_130312272523812806147141.jpgSo appealing to the science, to the evidence, is logical but not necessarily sufficient to change things for the better. Presenting farmers with the evidence that their methods are damaging and expecting them to say “very well, I take your point and I’ll stop today” is way short of a viable solution. We must realize that many farmers are facing more than just the loss of income but also the complete loss of culture, the reversal of a lifetime’s history and memories not to mention hopes for the future. We were in Mevagissey yesterday and exactly the same crisis faces the fishermen in Cornwall – not simply the loss of their jobs but the death of their culture – it’s real grief, not stick-in-the-mud nimbyism. 

Which brings me to another two factors.  Firstly, for decades we’ve allowed the market to decide.  We’ve worshipped the market, made it the sole arbiter of worth and now we’re paying the price of our idolatry – because by definition the market has no morals; the market doesn’t care what happens to farmers and fishermen, and it doesn’t care about the environmental crisis or environmentalists either – unless they eat into corporate profits. Secondly farmers and fishermen sell food just like oil companies sell oil, so consumers have to accept some of the blame for continuing to spend dangerously in spite of all the evidence. 

And so playing the blame game when there’s so much grief about is heartless, selfish and pointless. Farmers and fishermen can only change the way they work if we consumers – not just a few token ones – all change the way we live, the way we eat and the way we get about. We all have a vested interest in working together towards that end. Shoving the blame on to one group is just another symptom of arrested grieving.  We can do so much better than this, but only if we realize that there is only one habitat for all life on earth.  Farmers, fishermen, environmental campaigners and  consumers alike.  Everybody gets their say but not everybody gets their way. 

But I’ve left out what should be the most important participant in the whole process, and that’s the earth itself.  The earth doesn’t speak human, and as Wittgenstein once said – “if a lion could speak we wouldn’t be able to understand it”  but that doesn’t mean the earth can’t have a voice because although the earth may not speak in our rather simple way of understanding language, the earth is expressive to a degree that leaves our puny languages far behind. The understanding of what the earth is saying doesn’t just concern scientists, although it is scientific research that uncovered the problem and was also the cause of the problem. What the earth expresses is the concern of artists, writers and poets and ancient cultures that have mastered some of the earth’s languages, and some aspects of the most ancient spiritualities that have evolved in conversation with it (her?). But the earth does have one very direct way of speaking to us, and that is in the consequences of our actions. Perhaps it’s time for humans to take a back seat for a while and listen while the earth shows us what must be done. And of course it will be radical.

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Dawn over Mevagissey bay