Yesterday we made a spur of the moment decision to stay in North Wales for a couple more days rather than rush home to rescue the runner beans. We were up here in the spring when the ‘beast from the East’ felled our early sowings, but we were ready for the challenge because we’d already got a spare set propagated. This time the forecast is for temperatures just above freezing in Bath – so we may or may not get away with it, but in any case this is the time of year when we strip back almost all of the summer season’s tender plants and get down to winter jobs. In fact we’re up here still eating our own fresh runner beans, French beans and tomatoes.
With an extra three days to play with, my thoughts turned immediately towards getting some crabs. It’s incredibly difficut to buy fresh fish at the seaside these days. I was talking to a fellow allotmenteer in Cornwall a few weeks ago and he told me he’d quizzed the local supermarket about whether they sourced their fish from Newlyn. Oh yes, they assured him, but it has to go to their central depot before being shipped back again to the place where it was caught!
We have a couple of sources of fresh crabs up here but we decided to try one we’ve not been to before, and after a depressing drive past a massive dairy farm surrounded by fields of drab, chemical fuelled uniformity and devoid of any wildflowers; with every gateway barred by notices warning us to keep out from this biosecure bovine lock-in, we found the place we were looking for at the end of a narrow lane. They had no crabs, only frozen crabmeat and there was no prospect of getting more in because they’d missed the tide and what with the strong winds ……
On then another five miles to Rhiw where there is a house at the side of the road with a roughly painted sign outside the door. Put all thoughts of cosy cottages away, this house is a 1950’s style new build, fully equipped with Crittall windows. We’ve bought delicious crabs there before and so we pulled up and I tapped on the door. Yes there were crabs, and they were in a fridge in the garage, freshly caught and cooked. Ten minutes later after after an impromptu seminar on how to sex crabs and the best way to judge them (weigh them in your hand) and whether the meat tastes better in some seasons than others I felt like a crab expert and when the economy collapses after Brexit I’m going to set myself up as a consultant crab sexer. Anyway I bought two lovely hen crabs at £6 the pair and we drove back after stopping at the local Spar shop to get some cider and some wholemeal bread.
By this time it was a bit late for lunch so we went for a walk down the coast path. Last year, on September 4th, I counted 37 plants actually in flower on the same stretch of coast path. Now, in late October and with a fierce north easterly wind there were only very few survivors. 
We did however find a nice clump of Rock Samphire down near a little cove where we watched a female seal playing with her cub for about half an hour – close inshore – it was enchanting. We also put up a snipe who waited until we were almost upon it before it shot into the air like a clay from a trap. All the usual cast of gulls, shags, crows, jackdaws and chough were either sitting on rocks looking out across the slate grey Irish Sea, sporting ecstatically in the updraught from the cliff or congregating noisily in the fields behind. A tough looking ram sporting a fetching harness of blue raddle had been about his tupping with enthusiasm if the sheeps’ behinds were anything to go by, but he was taking a break and grazing contentedly with the others. We found a solitary field mushroom whose neighbours had been trodden into the grass, and when we were thoroughly cold we walked back.
So after all those hours of careful preparation here’s how to make a crab sandwich. You need, apart from the crabs, a small hammer (or a wooden rolling pin works well). You need a skewer or a sharp pointed kitchen knife, a large piece of newspaper to collect the bits and a bowl to put the meat in – that’s it. I always break all the claws off first and get the meat out of them first because that’s the most boring bit and I like to get it out of the way. The technique is to twist and pull. If you need to, give the claws a gentle whack to crack them, you don’t want to be eating bits of shell. If you’re lucky you can gently pull some of the meat out with your fingers but if not you prise it out with the little knife. When all the claws/legs are done you’ll have a surprising amount of white meat if you’ve chosen your crabs well. Next comes the bit where you prise the main shell apart. It can be a bit of a struggle, but it will almost always come apart if you apply enough firm pressure. Inside you’ll see some greyish green feathery looking things – these are the ‘dead mens’ fingers’ and you wouldn’t even eat them for a dare so chuck them out and get on with extracting as much meat as you can. The red meat is the gloopy bit, and that’s where a lot of the flavour is, so don’t be squeamish – get it out into the bowl. Then mix it all gently together with a fork and add some black pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. Butter some brown bread and heap on as much crab as you dare and then slap another slice of bread on top. Pour youself a glass of cider and and eat the sandwich with the filling running down your chin in the most disgusting way. If you want to spoil it completely you could make a salad with exhausted lettuce, lumps of red onion and slices of red pepper, but you can get that in a pub any day for about £15 a shot.
Preparation time 6 hours, cooking time zero, eating time – five exultant minutes!
rakes – then we were all playing. The driver was playing the resourceful hero walking back down the line, and we were all playing being abandoned in the mountains. The conductor was playing at raising our spirits with her announcements while the fault was fixed. Of course it was fixed, but when we pulled into the next station there were a small group of people having the time of their lives playing at being engineers and having manly conversations in their hi-vis jackets while a shed was unlocked and a mysterious component was found and seemed to make everyone happy again. And all that didn’t even begin to describe the bliss of rattling and clanking up the climb towards Snowdon with the wheel flanges squealing against the rails in all the twists and turns. And then there was the silence.
At the very first stop, Edward Thomas’s poem came flooding back to me, it was almost overwhelming, and it occured to me that no-one whose life had not begun in the steam age would quite understand the poem because these days, the station name-board would be accompanied by the loud thrumming of the diesel engines under your seat. Real unexpected silence was the best teacher of that poem anyone could hope for – a truly magic moment!
Deeply irresponsible I know, and we got properly told off by the ‘grown ups’ when we got back but they were a strange lot – they believed in the railway as fervently as they might have believed in the Second Coming. It was all too serious for us and we finally disgraced ourselves by crashing a truck. I imagine they breathed a sigh of relief to see the back of us. Now, decades later it’s easier to give them credit for their single-mindedness in building the railway. They were absolute pioneers and achieved their railway line in the teeth of a thousand difficulties. I wonder what the original volunteers think, now that the railway is a successful commercial enterprise. Knowing when to let go and allow the second and third generations take over is a real challenge, but only today it was announced that the slate region of Gwynnedd which includes the Ffestiniog Railway is to be nominated as a Unesco World Heritage site which, if it comes off, may bring even more visitors to the area. Something needs to replace the lost industries but it will create yet more stress on the culture and landscape if it’s not managed carefully and locally.
I can’t remember when I ate my first wild mushroom – it was probably as a child, when we ate at my grandparents’ cottage, or rather smallholding, in the Chilterns. Because of her childhood my mother knew and talked about wild mushrooms but so far as I remember never picked any. The first I’m ever sure I picked were on the playing field at Beechfield House, then part of Bath Academy of Art. It was nearly 50 years ago and I blagged a job as assistant groundsman during the summer vacation. 
being human necessarily being lonely? -and what was that lovely quote from Chekov? – “If you’re afraid of loneliness don’t marry!” . It sounds harsh but it’s the unpalatable truth we rarely want to address. The starting point for our humanity is a terrible aching isolation. Love, laughter, joy and ecstacy are acts of defiance; and all art – painting, drawing, writing – are a declaration of war. Like Jacob at the Jabbok Brook, we wrestle with the angel who refuses a blessing and we always emerge from the encounter more or less damaged. Art dares to grasp the ephemeral and render it. By painting his rotting leaf in its glorious colours I have snatched it from the same oblivion that awaits me. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age” That’s it Dylan Thomas – although the fuse metaphor always seems a bit contrived. “If only you could bottle it” say the emotionally illiterate who can’t be arsed to join the resistance.
It’s too cold and wet to get out today so apart from going to Nefyn to get some milk I’ve spend all day writing or thinking. From time to time we’re getting intense flurries of sleet and snow and as I was typing I noticed these fine mammatus clouds outside the window. They’re very odd and striking. Beyond them the sea is paynes grey and disturbed. By about 3.00pm patches of blue sky had begun to appear and although the wind is still a fierce and bitterly cold north westerly gale, and where the birds emptied the feeders yesterday, today they spent much of the time sheltering and periodically appearing as small flocks of one species or another.
Picking up my earlier thread, the other constant factor in our humanity is change. We age, and for years we ignore it or perhaps welcome the changes. We count it as maturity in our powerful days and then we cling to wisdom as the reward for our energy until we notice that our skin and sinews are less resilient than they once were. I once had a dream about being followed by two elephants. i woud occasionally catch sight of them, often a street away. I talked about it to Robin [my psychoanalytic psychotherapist] and he said “I’m a Freudian. They’re sex and death.”
