Category: The Potwell Inn Library

Winter’s last gasp – hopefully

A panoramic view of snow-capped mountains in the distance, surrounded by rolling green hills and a sparse forest of trees. The sky is partly cloudy.
Pen y Fan dusted with snow, seen across the Usk valley from above Talgarth

A couple of days ago a minor skirmish broke out on social media regarding the change of name from Brecon Beacons to Bannau Brycheiniog – in the wake of the announcement by the National Park Authority that it’s rapidly going broke. Coincidentally I was continuing to read Jan Morris’ excellent book “The Matter of Wales” which exposes the part played in the suppression of the Welsh language by the English educator Matthew Arnold. This latest outbreak of social media bile and stupidity was led by a mob of English speakers, one of whom bravely named the mountain at the top of this piece “Penny Fan”. The troubles of the National Park and – for all I know – the entire nation could, according to the wisdom of the internet, be laid at the door of the Welsh Language. All those expensive road signs. They’d be stuffing themselves with silver spoons and turtle soup if they’d given up Welsh and spoken the same as what we do and joined our brilliantly successful politics and neoliberal economic witchcraft. Ah well! Whatever that means the answer is probably Port Talbot.

Anyway, back home from our little adventure in the hills above Talgarth we discovered that the builders had not finished dealing with our black mould and can’t come back to complete until the Easter holidays are over, so we spent a couple of days cleaning up the cement dust and turned to the allotment which is the only bit of our lives in which we have complete agency. Wales is a beautiful and paradoxical country and I often wonder why I feel such a strong affinity – except today I was reading about the 1930’s and I suddenly remembered my dad’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the miners strikes, the railway strikes and the suffering of the people in the valley towns. I was raised on tales of riots, police brutality and solidarity. My dad and my grandfather were ardent socialists and I suppose I absorbed their principles from my earliest childhood. As I grew up and saw how people actually behave I was, and I remain, shocked.

But I want to celebrate for a moment one of the great things about The Bannau Brycheiniog and you may be surprised to learn that I’m talking about the ironmonger’s shops. They’ve all but disappeared in much of the UK but Webbs in Crickhowell and Jones in Hay on Wye are survivors in the glum world of out-of-town superstores. We used to have several of them in Bath – one of them, clinging to a famous name in the area – called Avery and Bowlers – has just closed down. Bowlers fixtures and fittings can still be seen in the Museum of Work here in Bath and there’s a gas engine there that I helped photograph in 1971 when their factory was abandoned. The other I remember was a firm called Hine and Collinson on the London road whose employees, in their brown warehouse coats, could find almost anything you could name on one or another of its five floors. I once bought a new double duplex glass chimney for my granny’s paraffin lamp which I inherited by default because no-one else wanted it.

Webbs in Crickhowell is such a great experience it should be on the tourist map. We never go in there without coming out with a new teapot or a curious kind of egg cup. Anything from a bottle opener to a chair can be found there. Jones Home Hardware in Hay on Wye performs a similar service to its customers, scattered across the neighbouring countryside, who might be in search of a crowbar, a chainsaw or a broomhandle. It carries a similarly eclectic stock of very useful things across several shop fronts and a broad public alleyway horizontally arranged on Castle Street.

Exterior view of Jones Home Hardware shop, featuring a traditional facade, advertising for Honda lawn and garden equipment, and various gardening tools displayed outside.

Of course the butchers and bakers who are usually mentioned in connection with high streets are also important; but there’s nothing quite like an ironmonger’s shop to exemplify the way people live around here. Hay on Wye is mainly known for tourism and as a centre for second hand books and can often feel like a gated community of retired art teachers, but the thursday market is still a lively affair with more (and much more attractive) bakers selling every kind of sourdough bread, kimchi and mead – and where the trinkets are decidedly upmarket. The ironmongers aren’t after the tourist pound – they still serve the rural hinterland; the bit we enjoy for free – and hints at another deeper Wales just under the surface. As for bookshops, Richard Booth’s bookshop is still the first and the one I probably enjoy the best. On Thursday I came out with about the tenth rewrite of a wartime book then called “Plants poisonous to livestock” which Madame gave me as a gift in the 1970s; brown; thin; foxed and printed on cheapest paper. My new version is bigger and better in every way and it also gives plentiful tips for disposing of humans you’ve fallen out with.

Meanwhile, as I always feared, the newly published flora of Brecknockshire (that’s Breconshire in old money) arrived too late to take with us to Talgarth and as soon as I took off the wrapper it fell open on the page describing Herb Paris. I know and I’ve seen the plant in Velvet Bottom, on the Mendips but that was in the days before I knew anything about proper recording and I didn’t take a photo I could refer back to for verification. In spite of a number of return visits to the spot I’ve never been able to record it. So yesterday I discovered that it’s found in the same nature reserve in Talgarth – Pwll y wrach – that we visited. I excuse my failure to see it because it’s the wrong month for flowering, and the lower paths, closest to the water, were closed due to the danger of falling ash trees. No such excuse for another long-sought plant; Spring Sandwort which grows on the hills just above where we were staying. We’ll just have to go back and take the new flora with us. The book took almost 60 years of intense research to write, and sadly the author, Mike Porter, died a year before it was published.

The weather, during our visit, was pretty wintry and we had rain, sleet and even snow during our four days. Thinking back over our sighting of the old Central Wales Hospital, the discreetly renamed asylum, I woke up this morning after a sleep troubled by dreams with a phrase from a Robert Burns poem turning slowly in my mind:

Man's inhumanity to man 
Makes countless thousands mourn!

Why do I love Wales so much? There’s a sentence in the Jan Morris book that comes close to expressing it. I often used the contrast between the favela and the steppes when I was in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It seemed to express the polarities of mood that I live with. Jan Morris, in trying to express the Welsh personality draws on another source from the Welsh language. The Welsh, she says, hover between hiraeth and hwyl – between the sad longing for a lost home, and the exhilaration of a full sail at sea. Either way round, it sounds a lot more creative than a diagnosis for some kind of disorder of the mind!

The light at the end of the tunnel.

A stone staircase leading down through an arched entrance, with a lantern visible at the bottom and greenery lining the path.
The passageway and steps leading steeply down from the Paragon to Walcot Street

We were lured out by the sunshine this morning and went for a decent circular walk taking in some shopping, a stop off at Toppings bookshop to book tickets for John Wright’s launch for his new book”Grasslands” in May, and then a bit of wall propping overlooking the weir feeling warm for the first time in months. Then another loop up the greatly diminished Walcot street to the top and back along through the Paragon, Milsom Street and home.

Don’t try this at home (or ever)
A lush patch of green foliage with bright yellow flowers growing alongside a stone wall.

Going down the steps to Walcot, if you looked closely across the road,you’d have noticed a rather early flowering Greater Celandine in a large pot outside a charity shop. I took this photo ages ago and didn’t think to photograph today’s specimen until it was too late. The thing is, I’d only today been looking today at an entry in a book on Welsh herbal remedies. The section on Celandine comes from a 15th Century herbal translated from the Welsh by John Pughe in the mid 18th century and taken from the tradition of the Physicians of Myddfai – so going back a bit.

A good eye salve. Take vinegar, white wine, the juice of Celandine, and Plantain. Mix them together in a pan and let them stand there 3 days and 3 nights, take it hence, keep it in a box and anoint thine eye therewith.

Here’s the thing, though. Among many other suggested uses, the bright yellow juice of the Greater Celandine is caustic enough to burn off warts and piles. There’s no way on earth anyone could put such a decoction in their eyes without damaging themselves unless there’s something in the recipe or the procedure that the canny doctors failed to share. I’ve got both glaucoma and cataracts (not that they trouble me much and they’re being well looked after by the NHS) but I’m sure that if Andy the optometrist were to lean across me with a mixture of Greater Celandine juice, vinegar and Plantain, and then try to drop it into my eyes I’d be out of the door pretty fast.

That’s the trouble with the reading that I’m doing about Wales and her history. Someone recently alluded to a kind of Cambrian fog that gathers over the culture of the country and leads unprepared travellers (like me) astray if we fail to inspect the teeth of the Bard to be sure that it’s gold and not mercury amalgam glittering between the lines.

We learned the difference between exegesis and eisegesis at theological college. Exegesis means trying to unpick what the original author was trying to say. Doing it properly can feel like unpacking a bottomless suitcase full of ancient garments and figuring out how they were worn. The opposite term, eisegesis, is much beloved by the evangelicals and involves trying to stuff a pair of your own theological pants into the suitcase after discovering that there’s nothing in there that quite matches your prejudices and so you have to chuck out the original contents and their bizarre notions, so you can get more of your ideas in and declare that you have the true meaning of the original.

There’s a phrase that comes from one of the great 20th century scholars of ancient literature who said – if that was what it meant then to the writer, what should it mean to us today? – which is to say that ancient literature and history need to be read with your brain in gear and not uncritically regurgitated as if it had nothing to do with the culture in which it was created.

The events of history are mundane and slippery; evanescent. It takes a poet to land a grappling hook on them and haul them in. It takes a poet to write about them fruitfully and yet another to read them well in vastly different circumstances and even those readings are as evanescent and slippery as the original events. There is never anything but provisional in the pursuit of history, and yet it’s the cultural air we breathe and so we must take it seriously.

I’ve been reading Jan Morris’ book “The Matter of Wales” and the third chapter deals with religious faith in Wales. I found it quite troubling because as she enumerated the waves of religion from the Celtic through Roman Catholicism, post Reformation Anglicanism (both enforced on the Welsh) and then waves of Calvinism, Methodism, Moravianism leading to the 20th century collapse of faith – I realized that in my own way I’d been touched by all of them and even experienced many of them myself. I went through what’s falsely described as Primitive Methodism in Sunday school (the Prims); conventional low Church of England, fiery atheism, Wesleyan Methodism, Evangelical low churches, Anglo Catholicism and theological college on the cusp of the Charismatic revolution. Whatever the light was at the end of the tunnel, they all seemed to swerve away from it when it got too challenging. Pretty well all of them operated a chaplaincy to the status quo. Nowadays if I was forced to put a label on my beliefs it would fall somewhere in the dim space between Celtic Christianity and Taoism but it would be better to evoke the old spiritual doctrine of reserve and apply it to the world in general and the understanding of past cultures in particular. The light at the end of the tunnel for me is the incredible freedom of feeling I don’t have to defend any orthodoxy at all.

The three graces – possibly

Learning by immersion

A panoramic view of a tranquil lake surrounded by rolling green hills and scattered trees under a blue sky with fluffy clouds.

Madame and I were sitting in bed today, reading peacefully – she on her tablet and I was immersed in a book by Jan Morris called “The Matter of Wales” the title being a playful use of language in order to indicate the substance, the deep matter of the country. The book was mentioned in Carwyn Graves book “Tir” which I’ve now finished and recommend without reservation as a gentle pushback against some of the more extreme (destructive) advocates of rewilding. For Carwyn Graves the Welsh landscape embodies the history of Wales for better and for worse. History is written in the soil, the rocks and fields; the livestock, the farmers and their lives but especially in their stories and poetry. It’s a beautiful book, and completely by accident I met one of his interviewees in the pub in Bwlch but we only talked about our experiences as writers for the then local Bristol newspapers. As soon as I saw his name in the book I recognised my lost opportunity to talk to an award winning maker of perry – pear cider.

The two books – Graves and Morris take interestingly different approaches to their subject. The landscape for Carwyn Graves is perfused with recollections of the old ways; a form of living history and its lessons for us in the present day. For Jan Morris the landscape is a living being; writhing, roiling, joyful and melancholy by turns. The history here is inscribed in lives lived in the landscape. She’s a magnificent writer on Wales.

So there we were (I mean Madame and me!) in bed reading and we have rules. Silences are only broken by mutual consent – “can I just play this ?….. ” Today she played an old recording of Pentangle – the brilliant Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny Thompson and Jacqui McShee with others – and in something of a Damascus moment I realized I’d left out music, and in what Flann O’Brien would have called a “Keats and Chapman” moment (without the terrible pun at the end); the whole landscape opened in front of me as if I were stood on a mountain top seeing the plains below receding in aerial perspective until the faint blue landscape reached the sea. Of course, you idiot! I thought -it’s language, history, literature, poetry, art, religion, drama and music. It’s the art of the kitchen table and the blackened pot suspended by its crân dân (fire crane) over a crackling fire, the blacksmith, the spinner and weaver, the shepherd, the singer and the traditional doctor, the understanding of plants, the wood carver and the brewer. One of the most inspiring paragraphs in Carwyn James ‘ book is his explanation of the way that in Welsh the word for culture isn’t the cocked finger, class ridden culture from across the Severn – but it also embodies all of the undertakings of ordinary people to advance the experience of being human. So emboldened by this thought I made some coffee, went into my room and guided by some odd instinct searched out a small book about Welsh folk medicine. I’ve known about the Physicians of Myddfai for many years in a more or less superficial way but I had no idea where Myddfai actually is. I had a strong idea of what I was intending to write but (as ever) no idea of how it would shape up so (also) as ever I hunted for a suitable photograph and came up with one I took of one of the three reservoirs which accompany the A470 across the Bannau Brycheiniog passing Pen y Fan. We stopped in a layby there for a brew-up and were joined by a couple of bikers from Merthyr Tydfil on their way to a campsite near Brecon. It seemed to me at the time that this was a near perfect view, but as I looked for the village of Myddfai on the OS map today, thinking to include the physicians who came from that area, I realised that the village was no more than a couple of valleys to the west of where I took the photo, and furthermore the foundational story/myth of these physicians involved a meeting between a farmer and a beautiful water goddess near a lake just like the one in the photograph.

My question would be – is it even possible to understand a landscape or a word in isolation from its whole culture. Many years ago we travelled by ferry and bus down to a small hamlet in southern Ireland for a holiday with friends. One of the friends owned a holiday cottage down there and knew some of the local people. One night we were introduced to two brothers who lived alone in a fairly squalid cottage just up the lane. The two brothers shared a bottle of Guinness with us and clearly thought we were pretty wealthy on account of one of us wearing a new pair of Docs. I had taken a small tape recorder with me and they told stories and sang songs to us provided we returned the offer with songs of our own. Our companions suffered a sudden attack of elective mutism and I sang a supporters song from Bristol Rovers which seemed to please them no end. Just to give a flavour of their lives, they told us that they had advertised in the Cork Examiner for a wife that they would share between them. The ad also generously noted that a pre-existing child would not be an obstacle! Anyway, it became very clear that their stories and songs of the Famine, and of the IRA battles of the past – not to mention a disastrous storm from some time in the distant past – all existed in their minds as if in the present. They sang and spoke of them as if they were still actually happening. It was a powerful example of what I’ve been thinking about in relation to Wales.

The photograph at the top was taken the day after my retirement ten years ago. I remember the journey because our youngest phoned just after the photo was taken with some kind of crisis and we had to abandon our plans and drive back to Bristol where we were still living. The photo and the memory belong together and can’t be separated.

So here I am ten years on, firmly resolved finally to speak and read Welsh. But the conglomeration of these thoughts has led me to the inevitable conclusion that this project goes much further than learning a bit of grammar and some words. The project is a kind of total immersion into the language; the broad culture, history and all the rest, in order that – finally again – I can see the Welsh plants in their broadest meanings, and I can see Welsh food and poetry, history and song as the Hegarty brothers saw their corner of southern Ireland – as essential to their humanity – daft and cruel as that might have seemed at the time. This is what I mean by using the phrase “learning by immersion” because it’s the absolute prerequisite for deep connection with any place in the world.

I’ve done a bit with the words already and I’m pleased to be able to write and say “good morning dragon” in Welsh, although I doubt if there will be any opportunities to use it, and so I’ve switched over to a different but well-connected course which is filling me equally with terror and hope. I can already say most of “I would like to learn to speak Welsh” without having to take a lie down in the middle. Madame has banned me from doing any practice in her presence. Oh and I’ve bought some – well quite a lot of – books. Learning by immersion, you see.

An open grassy field with a row of trees, possibly apple trees, under a cloudy sky, surrounded by rolling hills in the background.
One of the Marcher Network orchards near Cwmdu

By the rivers of Babylon. I need a word and only Welsh will do

The first basin on the K & A drained for maintenance today to the bewilderment of a heron.

Looking for a photo to kick this post off I did a search and was astounded at the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken in Welsh landscapes over the years but this one fell into my lap, walking along the Kennet and Avon canal in central Bath. There’s a bigger frame of reference than English can express and it coalesces around a wonderful Welsh idea; the concept of “hiraeth”. I hesitate to call it a word because its reach extends far beyond its seven letters.

Derived from hir (long) and aeth (grief/sorrow), it combines nostalgia with a sense of grief or longing and it is considered a cornerstone of Welsh identity, reflecting a longing for lost traditions, language, or landscape.  It refers to a deep, often melancholy longing for a home or time that cannot be revisited. (Google Gemini search)

I must add at the outset that I have a very limited knowledge of the Welsh language, but I learned to pronounce Welsh place-names when I was helping to run some worker-writer’s workshops in the valley towns several decades ago. Neither Ian, my co-worker or I had a car and so we did all our travelling by train and bus and to avoid entertaining the other passengers I managed to learn how to learn to pronounce Welsh place-names properly. When confronted with a destination like Ystradgynlais it paid dividends to know how to pronounce it – even if the rest of the conversation was in English. I was once even congratulated on my pronunciation by a Welsh speaking farmers wife on Lleyn and I long for the day when I’ll be brave enough to wish the shopkeeper good morning in Welsh somewhere in North Wales without the paralysing fear of being replied to in the same language. My old Greek tutor Gerry Angel always said there were only two languages in the world worth learning – Greek and Welsh – and I’ve never had enough time to learn Welsh until (perhaps) now. I eventually passed the (New Testament) Greek exam.

A language is the matrix in which the culture of a country and its people is contained, and it follows that there are certain ideas, emotions and concepts that can’t be translated except by severing them from their context, history and memory. It also follows that there are things that can be said in Welsh that can’t be said in English. Learning Welsh, it seems to me, would entail embedding myself in the whole history and culture of the land rather than mastering the superficial meaning of even a few thousand words.

I’m familiar with this in my own experience because my native English tongue is from Gloucestershire where – as a child – we still used “thee, you and thou” – a habit that the teachers did their best to beat out of us. Anyway, they’re a most useful set of words because they convey degrees of familiarity Like the French vou and tu leaving “you” with an association of hostility and suspicion. When I first went to work as a labourer in a steel erecting firm, I was always (young, dumb and hairy) addressed as “you”. We also had a version of what the linguists call a soft mutation which is very common in Welsh. For us, the tram roads carrying coal from Coalpit Heath were always known as “dram roads”. If you were encouraging someone from the sidelines it would be “go ‘ee’ – a shortened form of “thee”. You don’t learn any of these informal grammar rules through books, you learn them from use. I’ve told this story before, but I buy all our rough sawn wood for the allotment from a timberyard near where I was born. Just talking to the counter staff there is to be transported back to my own history and sense of place, so – going back to the beginning of that long excursus, “hiraeth” is the perfect word to describe that sense of loss. The thousands of acres of farmland I walked over and played on as a child are all built over. My childhood territory is dissected by a ring road and a motorway and the brickworks and pitheads have all, bar a few crumbling walls, disappeared along with out unique dialect and the last few miners have died. The abundant methodist chapels are gone or converted into fashionable homes for incomers. The railway lines have become cyclepaths – a muggers’ paradise; predators on unwary cyclists and walkers. The Pines Express no longer thunders through the triangular junction. There’s no way back. Without land, language, culture or memories we are adrift without even our own word to describe the melancholy of it.

I’ve just started reading a marvellous book by Carwyn Graves (grovelling apologies for getting both his name and gender wrong yesterday) – entitled “Tir” – the Welsh word embodying the associated meanings of land types within Wales. I’ve got both of his previous two books, “Welsh Food Stories” and “Apples of Wales” and they both approach their subjects through the prism of Welsh history and culture. “Tir” casts a ray of light on all sorts of puzzling phenomena around landscapes – for instance – why are so many Welsh farmers deeply suspicious of the idea of rewilding? The answer is compelling and fascinating and would serve admirably as a push-back against rewilding as an abandonment of thousands of years of farming history. I’ve still got some way to go before finishing reading about all seven types of landscape – each expressed in a different word. It’s a marvellous book and I can’t recommend it too highly. It’s sent me back to the maps and dictionaries I’ve bought over the years but never fully understood and it’s also sent me back to seriously considering learning the language.

After ten years of complaining to our landlord about damp and black mould in our concrete building they’ve finally agreed to start doing the remedial work; installing ventilation extractor fans and mould proofing the walls as well as making good the botched plastering in a couple of rooms. The work is going to take a week so we’re moving out and we’ve rented a cottage high up in the Bannau Brycheiniog near the top of the next valley along from the photo. It looks like absolute paradise – the long road up leads past an abandoned asylum and a nature reserve and sits below the highest peak in the Eastern range. We’ve walked it before and it’s not in the least pretty – a big bog with a stone in the middle – but there’s a walk leading down from it to the main road that’s absolutely breathtaking. I’ve already got my plant lists ready and organised thanks to Notebook LM which happily did the work of processing a heap of data. When in despair, make a list, learn a language, read a book. It works for me!

I really should stop writing about Cornwall.

The tin tabernacle in Cadgwith

Another wet day in Cornwall – in Camborne they’ve exceeded the biblical flood by exceeding 40 consecutive days of rain. It hasn’t been a huge problem for us down at the southernmost tip except for the lanes – there’s only one really main road and the rest are pretty much lanes anyway and they are running with water; some right across and others at both edges but all the puddles are sheltering murderous suspension wrecking potholes. If anyone’s got a spare billion pounds we could do with some of it down here.

Anyway, the upshot of the long days confined to our rented cottage on the top of a cliff is that Madame has been doing a lot of internet surfing, and today she typed in my name into Gemini and discovered that I am the landlord of a pub in Helston whose wife was once a police dog-handler but who has sadly died. In fact, according to the infallible AI, several pubs in the neighbourhood are claiming that I am their landlord – which prompted me to ask her whether it would be OK to pop down to the Five Pilchards to see my virtual wife. Madame was not amused. Much as I love Google Gemini, it makes more false connections than a village gossip, and bigamy is still a crime.

Sadly spring has not sprung nearly as much as we’d hoped so neither the plant hunting nor the moth trapping have taken up much of our time and among other things – like writing this blog – we’ve been binge watching the old DVD’s we brought down. John Schlesinger’s “Cold Comfort Farm” is one of the funniest films ever, and Ian McKellen’s sermon to the Quivering Brethren as Amos Starkadder is an act of sheer joy. I’ve even (naughtily) started sermons myself once or twice with the words “ye’re all damned”; not forgetting to grip the edge of the pulpit and stare at the congregation with sheer malevolence for fifteen seconds. But we also watched Alec Guinness’s superb performance as George Smiley in John Le Carré’s Karla trilogy. The two BBC series miss out the middle book. It was a treat, and an acting seminar, to watch Alec Guinness playing such a morally complex character. The very last words that Smiley speaks as Karla is led away, when someone says “George you’ve won” and he replies “I suppose I have” made me wish I could hug him. It was so brilliantly done; the way he managed to express the sadness and loss of winning his epic battle.

All that ambiguity sent me straight back to yesterday’s post with the thought that I’d missed an important aspect of flourishing even though I did say that it’s by no means a primrose path. When, back in the day, I talked to parents about christening, I would often find that they had an odd idea that we believed that babies are born bad and needed to be made good by baptism. Something about washing away sins had taken root in the collective understanding. Frankly I think that’s a horrible idea, but even horrible ideas deserve a bit of thought. I talked yesterday about cultivating virtuous habits – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage; but I didn’t offer any idea of what the starting point might be. The idea that we’re born bad and need to be made good which I described as horrible would be one place (but totally wrong I think). On the other hand I’d find it difficult to say that we’re born perfect at the top of a greasy pole of corruption because that’s equally far fetched and nasty. So what about a working definition of what we might call the human condition which pitches us somewhere near the middle point that Aristotle was so keen for us to maintain. Then we say that we can move up or down the scale by way of good or bad habits.

Each of the four or perhaps fifteen virtues which can, in combination lead us towards flourishing and fulfilment have their counterparts which can lead us in the opposite direction; unhappiness and suffering. As an example I could mention affairs. We’re all much of a muchness in the sexual attraction stakes; many of us have primary commitments but that doesn’t stop us from meeting others that we find attractive. In a very long career of helping people through crises of their own making, one factor comes to the surface almost every time. We rarely get ourselves into trouble in one giant act of folly. We do it step by tiny step and then one day it’s too late. The same goes for any kind of addiction; food, alcohol, drugs, erotic fantasies, fraud, thieving, field botany or hoarding rubbish. Thankfully I’m not a counsellor so you needn’t worry that I’m about to offer advice but I’ll just quote a line from an ee cummings poem –

where’s too far said he

where you are said she

Notice also that I haven’t mentioned any divine punishments or rewards. That’s because I don’t believe in them. None of the purported torments of hell can measure up to the guilt and shame brought upon us by our own perversity, although there are many occasions when I wish that Danté’s circles of hell which included special places for bishops, princes, corrupt politicians and not forgetting people who didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Occasionally I really wish that could be true. But there are always some wicked people who seem to get away with it. On the other hand I’ve sat with some horrible people who – as they lay dying – seemed to be suffering terrible agonies of remorse. Too late!

Conversely I think that the idea we should punish ourselves and live shadow lives in order to achieve the extremely notional rewards of heaven is also wicked. The way we live our lives can’t or shouldn’t be reduced to the spreadsheets and calculus of rulebooks. Is there anything wrong with muddling along and trying very hard to learn from your mistakes?

Looking out to sea in a gale from Kynance Cove café towards Lizard point. Hot chocolate – heaven; rocks – hell.

Kynance Cove – never disappoints.

The advantage of going on an organised field trip is that you can see all sorts of plants and have them identified by an expert. The downside is that the finds are identified by an expert and so you miss the best bit, which is to answer the question what’s this plant that I’ve never seen before called by going through the books and if it’s at all rare, eliminating every other possibility.

There’s an exceptionally rare plant that only grows on the Lizard in Cornwall called Land Quillwort- Isoetes histrix and we’ve been hunting for it for several years because it’s very tiny and hard to spot (about the size of a 5p piece), and it grows in winter and dies back in February – which isn’t a time that we usually come down here because there’s so much more going on in March and April. Booking a cottage in mid-winter in the hope of finding a single specimen is way beyond our pain threshold usually but the way half term worked out this year meant that the rentals go up from ridiculous to astronomic the moment the schools break up; so here we are battling the storms and driving rain refinding what seems to be the best candidate up on the clifftop. It’s a fussy little plant that prefers thin soils on the serpentine rock and positively thrives on being inundated with water for at least part of the year while laughing at droughts during its summer rest. So for whatever reason we’ve always rejected it in the past. It could have been a Spring Squill but that’s got big bulbs, or thrift but that only looks the same very early in the season and doesn’t have bulbs but tangled roots and you can often see the dried flower heads from last season. There’s such a short window of opportunity. But the date is bang on, the situation and environment are right and the location within the 10K map square came from the big database.

So today the ducks lined up, it stopped raining and the sun shone so we returned to the same spot; I had a better idea of what I was looking for and my confidence grew from 30% to 90% – which is as far as it ever gets! We’d found and photographed a Land Quillwort and – as always happens – once you’ve seen one you can find all the others. We also photographed Cornish Heath – another rare one which we’ve never recorded before although we’ve seen it and guessed it probably was. So two rarities on record – that’s a pretty good start to the year, and we sealed the day with a celebratory bacon baguette and mug of tea down at the beach cafe while we watched the enormous swell crashing against the cliffs. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

Back in the books, though, it was distressing to read in the biography of Linnaeus and Buffon that I mentioned yesterday, how Linnaeus’ followers followed his lead in locking women out of education and dividing the human race into separate species, then sorting them in order of their supposed intelligence, thereby building a spurious theoretical framework to support slavery, racial hatred and the diminishing of women. We are so easily bamboozled when religion and science get merged into a mule species that can go nowhere and cause nothing but suffering.

Liquid sunshine in Cornwall

This photo was taken on the road to Kynance Cove. We originally intended to go to Lizard point to photograph the sea state but when I got out of the car to swipe our National Trust card I was very nearly blown off my feet by the fierce wind, and so we thought Kynance would be the better bet; but the same thing happened there. We’re between so-called named storms at the moment but you wouldn’t think so. I don’t think we’ve ever seen worse sea conditions here in half a century of visits; no wonder there’s a lighthouse down at the point. We’ve had occasional breaks in the low cloud today but for the most part it’s been a lowering slate grey, laden with Atlantic rain which its been releasing as steady drizzle when it’s not hammering down. The cloud layer was so low at times that the gulls were occasionally disappearing into it. Not quite the light rain in the Met Office forecast. The sea spray, seen from the Kynance road was topping the cliffs over 50 feet high, and you could almost feel the impact of the waves dumping on the shore, through your body. The sea itself was roiling; white and foam flecked to 100 yards out. There were just three cars in the car park when we arrived and within a few minute we were alone; the car rocking in the 50 mph gusts. As ever there were a few crows playing in the wind but they were too far away and too fast to identify. There are Choughs down at the point and they’re the greatest acrobats of all – they can even fly upside down.

So we made our way back and had a cup of tea before we went down the steep path to Cadgwith cove and took more photos there. Lizard looked like an abandoned village but there were a few people standing on the Todden in Cadgwith. They seemed quite happy but an exceptional wave could probably have taken them. John Betjeman, in one of his travel guides once described Lizard village as having all the charm of an army married quarters. It’s not pretty but it’s a very functional place where it seems entirely appropriate that one of the bar staff in the pub, was wearing an RNLI pager. There’s a primary school, a couple of pubs and a doctor’s surgery but over the years the grocery store, the big greasy spoon cafe and the post office have all gone; along with all bar a couple of the serpentine turners in their shacks.

So no moths, no plants and hardly any birds today – which gave us more time for reading. I brought some big natural history books down but I just can’t stop reading a paperback by Jason Roberts called “Every Living Thing” which won the 2025 Pulitzer prize for biography. It describes the parallel lives of two pioneering botanists with entirely different views. Linnaeus, inventor of the binomial system for naming living things and Buffon his French rival. One of the takeaway points from this book is that although Linnaeus’ fame grew and Buffon’s faded, the latter may have been on the better track, laying the foundations for later developments like the discovery of DNA. Their disputes revealed the extent to which they were both moulded and directed by the religious and societal culture of the time, and for me at least, reveals what an unpleasant man Linnaeus must have been.

Below are some pictures of the Kynance road and Cadgwith Cove today.

First trip of the year – moderately chaotic preparations.

The old Serpentine works at Poltesco.

The problem when the Potwell Inn goes on tour is that our plans for a break out invariably involve quite a few bits of kit. So a week before we set out, and perfused with optimism, we attempt to stow as many things as we could possibly need into our little (and rather old) car. The car itself needs plenty of TLC, and the campervan cost us more to run this year than an upmarket old people’s home. So this trip is by car – which entailed getting the brakes serviced and the windscreen wipers replaced in honour of the exceptionally gloomy weather predictions. The forecasts also make most of our longed for plans unattainable so we’ve also packed (just in case) for reading, drawing, mothing, botanizing and watching a load of films on DVD that we seem to remember we enjoyed at the time.

The packing has involved four quite different scenarios. The first is to spend the time walking hand in hand through dappled sunshine; finding and recording rare plants by the dozen. The second is to work our way through our collection of DVD’s and the third is to read a load of pretty impenetrable books. Options two and three may also include lively moments of conflict due to the cramped environment. Alongside all this intellectual stimulation there is the hope that the nights will be mild and windless enough to make a list of moths attracted to the new moth trap. A quick bit of research suggests that with nothing more than a gentle zephyr from a warm quarter and either a bucket of home made sugaring solution or a prolific ivy bush in flower outside the door we may even find a few volunteers for ID including some migrants without appropriate mothy passports. Madame has also packed a large quantity of paper and drawing equipment.

This one’s a 200 mile drive to the Lizard in the extreme South West of Cornwall; proper – next stop America territory. So cameras, head torch, GPS unit and hand lenses are all charged up, the boots are oiled and waterproofed and the laundry revived after the unexpected flood caused by a broken washing machine – is there a theme here? The quills were sharpened; the oak-gall ink and hand-made nettle paper were prepared (maybe I told a tiny lie there). The heat dryer passed silently, surrounded by its favourite washing at the end of December and rather like the two elderly ladies in Laurie Lee’s “Cider with Rosie” the washing machine went into terminal decline when the dryer died. So it was an interesting week.

Madame made pasties on Wednesday last to get our palates tuned for the reckless beauty of Cornish haute cuisine. Stargazy Pie and White Pudding come to mind. We’re working our way through an endless series of named storms and it seems perfectly possible that we’ll have gone through the alphabet by the end of February, so It’s a long way to drive to have your dreams dashed by Storm Zelah. On the other hand when you’re young and madly in love everything is lovely. Sadly we’ve moved on from that bit – well, at least the young bit. Wish us luck!

Two firsts – but which is the more exciting?

But in answer to a question I was asked during the week– “What was the actual millionth word?” – well you may think it was a bit of a disappointment because it was “much”. Feel free to develop any metaphorical significance you like; it’s Freedom Hall here at the Potwell Inn. The oldest existing version of St Mark’s gospel ends mysteriously with the Greek word “gar” – ‘because‘ and scholars have had a field day inventing possible reasons and even helpfully completing the book to their own tastes. In the case of the Potwell Inn, I like the word ‘much’ as much as any other but I finished the sentence in any case and after a short rest, here we are again.

Last Monday was alleged to be some novelty, named (by the media) “Blue Monday. We were all supposed to be fed-up by the endlessness of winter, the short hours of daylight and our January bank statements. I’m sorry to buck the trend but I had a lovely day which included feeling very pleased with myself for completing last year’s resolutions but also submitting 420 completed botanical records to the Vice County Recorder which, thinking about it, probably spoiled her day. But maybe the crowning moment was finding a Lesser Celandine in flower on one of the two main roads into Bath. Notwithstanding the pouring rain and wind it brought a touch of spring into our hearts. It was in a half-starved looking garden just opposite the derelict hotel where the police were busy removing 700 cannabis plants from an illegal factory. You see, in Bath there’s no need for a writer to make stuff up – it just comes along, barely 50m from where we live. The smell of cannabis was so strong nearby that we called the spot “Skunk Corner” and wondered how the residents managed to survive their habits. It may well turn out that they lived blameless lives, living next door to the extractor fans, which would be a great example of blaming the victim.

The Celandine wasn’t the first exciting plant of the year. That was the Greater Dodder that was found climbing up a riverside nettle on the New Year plant hunt by the same Vice County Recorder whose Monday I may have turned blue. Sorry about that. The Dodder was – if not rare, certainly very unusual which bears out my belief that the place to look for rarities begins as you step out of the door. The VCR, Helena, was kind enough to email back and say that some of my records were interesting. Chatting to our friend Charlie yesterday – he’s South African – he said that was a classic example of British understatement. On the other hand, they might be 90% wrong which is why we all have to hand in our homework for review. We don’t overdo praise here in the UK.

But if you were to ask me to say which find was the most important, then I’d say the Celandine was most important and exciting to me and the Greater Dodder was more important to science, with the rider that whilst Celandines may be ubiquitous, like House Sparrows, Starlings and Turtle Doves once were – if we don’t record them they might begin to disappear too. But the most important reason for my ranking the Celandine highest is that it’s one of the most noticeable markers for Spring. Ever reliable, easy to find and bright in colour so they show themselves in hedgerows, they always gladden the heart. However grey, cold and wet the weather the Celandines will announce the turbo-charged arrival of the new plant hunting season.

We’re off to the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall for a break but the weather outlook is pretty awful. Nonetheless we’ve been checking our plant hunting equipment – hand lenses, GPS unit, charging batteries, testing cameras and SD cards, packing bags and running tests on the new moth trap, choosing books and waterproofs. So we don’t expect too much from the weather and probably the moths will be hard to find but whatever happens we’ll have fun and if the worst comes to the worst I’ll finish reading three big books, two on fungi and a new one on hedgerows. The allotment is tucked up for the winter and the trail cam is busy with visits from fox, badger, squirrel, domestic cat and – of course – rats. We’ve filmed the fox predating rats which was a heartening sight and the soil is taking a well-earned rest, although from reading my fungus books I’m discovering just how busy it is just below the surface.

I’ve also been testing Googl Gemini AI to see if it can help with my work – mostly playing with it and asking difficult questions to see what happens. It’s immensely powerful – it digested ten years of my writing in a minute and came up with a summary that was more right than wrong but still needs a pile of editing. There seems to be an algorithm that favours the more recent over the older stuff and there are one or two WTF? moments including a word I’ve never used and had to look up. I’d like to teach it to do routine and boring jobs on the spreadsheets so that I can get on with the more interesting bits.

We seem to be living in what the Chinese call “interesting times” – with what used to be regarded as responsible politicians behaving like hooligans outside the pub on a summer Friday night. Madame has suggested that we don’t watch TV or read newspapers while we’re away. It’s an attractive proposition. When I was very young my friend Eddy and I used to go occasionally to a night club in Yate. We were almost always refused admission because we were deemed too scruffy. Every Friday the bouncers would clear the club at closing time as soon as the inevitable fight broke out, and if it didn’t they would start it anyway. I tried once to point out to the bouncers that the fights were always started by young men wearing suits and not looking scruffy. Like so many occasions in my life I got into trouble for pointing out the evidence. I was thinking about this last night and I realized that this is a pattern that’s been repeated since I was about twelve. Among my many talents is a capacity to enrage people who dislike being challenged. Ah well, I’m not apologising!

Books mentioned – I recommend them all:

  • Fungi – Collins New Naturalist series: Brian Spooner and Peter Roberts
  • The Fifth Kingdom -An introduction to Mycology Brice Kendrick
  • Hedges – Robert Wolton, Bloomsbury British Wildlife Collection.

Jam tomorrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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