Category: The Potwell Inn Library

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.

Finally the ducks are all in a row

You’ve no idea how lovely it is to feel well again; to wake up in the morning full of ideas; relishing each day and going out on our walks once more; a bit further each time. I still don’t know with any certainty what was wrong with me but in the end – and by default because they’d looked at every other possibility – I think it all boiled down to iron deficiency anaemia caused by polyps in my colon which were removed by a lovely team at the RUH and then, after a troubled start on iron tablets which initially made me sicker than ever, they were changed for another type and apart from the bother of waking myself up to take them at 5.00am, I feel better than I’ve felt for around 18 months. Hooray for the NHS and the Royal United Hospital ….. and for our GP who started the ball rolling on what must have been a hunch.

So last year didn’t go too well on the travel front – rescued twice by the AA and ignominiously towed home on a trailer; the engine blew up once, cambelt, water pump, clutch and alternator needed replacing and two trips were cancelled before they even began. But that was then and this is now and the van, Madame and me are ready for (amost) anything but especially for a trip to the Lizard which was just ravaged by storm Goretti and lost both water, electricity and internet for a couple of days. We’re staying in a rented clifftop cottage and the photos at the top were all taken through the half-door; the one on the bottom left taken early on the morning of our last departure. Every time we leave it feels like a small bereavement – there’s a bit of my soul living there permanently.

Having spent several years on the neighbourhood plants – Lizard is a botanical hotspot – I’ve just finished fixing up a moth trap. It’s very early in the year and we don’t expect more than a handful of visitors, but in many ways a slow start is the best way for beginners like us. The more projects we embark on, the more the planning resembles a military campaign – laptops, mobile wiFi router and aerial, books, maps, food; cameras, lenses, tripods, kitchen sink. You get the picture. I’ve even bought a new, clonking great monograph on hedgerows to keep me happy if it rains non-stop, and that’s happened on several previous trips.

Eskdale 2019

Taking photographs is only a fraction of the battle, though. Identifying the plant in question is three quarters of the fun. For instance the little darling below was – so far as I was concerned – a white form of death cap that we found on the edge of a wood in Cumbria a few years ago. It’s been labelled and sitting in the photos folder for years until yesterday when I was reading a brilliant monograph on fungi in the New Naturalist series – when I discovered that it also looked very like another fungus known as Destroying Angel which really is white. In the intervening years I’ve learned how to access the massive power of databases and so I checked on the largest I could find and discovered that neither of the fungi is even recorded close to the place we found it, but that even so my initial identification was more likely to be correct. There is a test to distinguish them but of course the subject of the photo is long gone and so it will always remain an unanswerable question.

That’s the thing about nature, it seems far more malleable than we would wish. It would be fairer to say that short of a full DNA profile almost all our identifications are provisional. Like weather forecasts ID’s are correct on the basis of percentages. 100% certainty is rarer than we’d like. Of course that merely means that we should be more modest about our certainties. A couple of days ago we were on a plant hunt and I overheard someone airily identifying a Feverfew with a lot more conviction than I would dare to offer. In fact, the more I learn about fungi the less likely I am ever to forage for them. Both the Death Cap and the Destroying Angel are regularly and fatally confused with edible fungi. No thanks, then, I’ll have the fish fingers!

So, the packing lists are all made and the kit is all checked over, charged up and wrapped. You would think we were off up the Amazon but you need to remember that as a list addict, planning is almost as much fun as getting there. It doesn’t always work of course, we once drove up to Pembrokeshire for a camping holiday only to discover I’d left all the tent poles behind. On another occasion I forgot the air mattresses, and after a trip to the local supermarket we bought a couple of air beds that were so thick and luxurious our noses were almost touching the flysheet.

But at this moment I can hardly contain my excitement at the prospect of waking up to the sound of the sea and walking between fields and hedgerows which – being much further south – are just beginning to wake up. Bring it on! – we say.

Losing my religion – again

18th March 2017 – River Wye at Hay

On the 18th March 2017 at 12.30 pm standing beside the river Wye beneath the road bridge from Hay I watched the water flooding past and realized that it had gone again. It wasn’t a great shock. It had been no greater than a ghostly presence from not long before I retired. It was sudden but completely undramatic. “Oh well” I thought, as I turned away from the river, “That’s it then”. I’d had plenty of previous experiences of sudden changes in my ways of understanding the world and where I belonged in it but it took a while to describe it in anything like useful ways.

Imagine a snake, or a dragonfly larva. Snakes shed their skins as they grow out of them and they begin to wear out. Larvae of all kinds go through a period of shape shifting and as pupae go through various distinctive stages known as instars before the final stage in which a butterfly, or moth or dragonfly emerges, mates and begins the cycle once more. Much as we might wish that nature stood still, it’s always changing. Seasons pass, crops grow and are harvested, young animals are born and pass through widely different life-cycles before they die. The soil; the earth isn’t an inert growing medium it’s teeming with unimaginably numerous interdependent life forms. From the window of our flat we see a small park, trees and the passing river. It’s never still for a moment. However we describe nature it’s hard to use descriptions like peace and tranquility with any honesty. Nature is not a static thing at all; things grow and change and – if we’ve any kind of living faith in anything; any attachment that you might loosely call spirituality – we have to learn to allow for growth and the occasionally major changes that come with it. Some people call losing their faith a tragedy I don’t agree. You have to lose the old, worn-out ideas and attachments in order to grow. Love cannot exist without the certainty of loss.

So I want to describe what I think are two key factors in thinking about these big changes in belief. Firstly, the image of skin shedding in snakes and the shapeshifting of instars isn’t just a fanciful metaphor. These natural life-forms (as we are too) have no alternative, and neither have we if you think about it. Human beliefs also have life expectancy. Religious belief is especially prone to calcification. There’s a gradual descent, for instance from sacrament to ritual, and from ritual to tradition then finally from tradition to habit. Rudolph Otto used the term “numinous” to describe the mysterious and overwhelming sense that floods our minds seemingly directly and not mediated by the senses or the intellect. One word that’s often used to describe such an experience is sacramental. Ordinary everyday things seem to glow with meaning even as they remain entirely themselves. But as these sacramental experiences calcify they lose their fascination and power to move us and become worthless as agents in the next key factor which is the change in perspective that comes at the same time. These powerful experiences don’t fiddle about with the natural world so it becomes more colourful or beautiful; what changes is the way in which we perceive it.

So why do we fight so hard to turn these religious or spiritual moments into stone? Why on earth would we want to freeze revelations until they become unintelligible, meaningless to anyone else. Traditions are the barnacles that police the boundaries of sacred space.

I sometimes seem to receive messages; dreams and waking dreams. I wouldn’t say that these sudden insights are frequent visitors and I’ve always thought of them as being perfectly natural – not hallucinations but just the deep parts of my mind making creative connections and expressing them as poetic ideas. For me, by the time I retired, the sacramental seemed to have turned into ritual where getting it right had become more important than entering the mystery. I frequently tag these pieces with the phrase “green spirituality”, which I’m afraid raises more questions than it settles. Most of the pieces are grasping at possible meanings for it and which I’ve yet to find myself. I’m not coming to this as an expert in any sense. What I’m certain of is that the West in particular is suffering from some kind of spiritual crisis which is eating away at our humanity. I’m just trying to find a way through the rubble, and one possible first step follows:

In the episode of Rick Stein’s Australia that aired on BBC Two on January 6, 2026, Rick Stein spoke with two Aboriginal women in Sydney who shared their knowledge of native food ingredients.They were part of the the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. But what knocked me over wasn’t a recipe or anything like that. It was the way they described themselves as being part of the earth. Doesn’t that perfectly describe our western estrangement from the earth. We know there’s something wrong, and we create libraries of books and films on the beauty and healing power of nature but the problem isn’t solved by sitting under a tree, reading a book or watching a video, because we should be working on mending that broken relationship.

But in spite of any misgivings we’re constantly bombarded with the idea that nature has healing powers. Go for a walk they say, and feel the power of nature. Perhaps nature’s a bit shy when it comes to sceptics like me, but in the hundreds if not thousands of miles I’ve walked fields and tracks both here in the UK and in Europe I’ve yet to experience that power unless I was actively engaging with nature at the same time; listening to and identifying birds; watching and recording wildlife – especially plants. Reading about them, studying them especially the ones in the middle of Bath and outside our front door. Like everybody else I’m excited when I read about aboriginal and first nation people and their connectedness with the earth, but First Nation peoples have a far more intimate relationship with nature than we do. It goes so much further than providing food and shelter. It includes an intimate knowledge of plant locations, special properties and healing potential. When a First Nation person goes for a solitary walk, friends and acquaintances in the plant and animal kingdoms crowd in on them. They even talk to them -which sounds odd until I think that we talk to our plants on the allotment, ask them how they’re doing? is there anything they need? and they respond – more water; more light; get rid of those bugs but leave the others. I don’t believe in the supernatural and I don’t use those voices to claim an unchallengeable religious advantage, it’s just a feature of the unconscious mind in some sort of resonance with whatever you call it – let’s provisionally say the Tao.

I do believe that underlying Nature, of which we’re a part, is some kind of rule bearing substratum. Doesn’t it strike you as absolutely miraculous that behind the mind blowing diversity of nature there lies a silent orderliness that can only be intuited and – it seems – and never fully described. “Whereof we cannot speak , thereof we must remain silent” said Wittgenstein. “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao” – said Lao Tzu It’s that fundamental orderliness without which science would not be possible and neither would the tools of the artist, the musician and the poet. We’re all – in Dylan Thomas’s words –“dumb to tell the crooked rose. My youth is driven by the same wintry fever”.

So, to try to be a bit practical for once; how can anyone move on from just liking a walk in the woods to developing that intimate relationship with nature which is the true source of healing and fulfilment. Well I’m sure there are thousands of suggestions out there offering suffering and discomfort in abundance, not to mention subscriptions. Ten years ago I leaned on the sea wall rails in St Ives at New Year and realized that I had no idea what kind of gull I was looking at. I made a stupid resolution that I wouldn’t pass anything, ever again, that I couldn’t name. I think that lasted just about long enough for me to cross the road and buy a bird book. But out of acorns, great oaks grow, and I changed the way I observed nature, started to photograph plants, bought books when I could afford them and began keeping rudimentary records. I bought a pocket lens and discovered that the closer I looked the more fascinating things became. There was no conflict between science, creativity and nature, because the more I understood the more beautiful nature became.

For the first couple of years I started to keep a secret journal; one which no-one else would ever see. But then, changing technology killed the software I was using and so I started this blog; tracking the long journey into the new. If anyone else can make use of it as a guide or a map then I’ll be pleased. You might well spot me one day on my hands and knees in the mud. I might be meditating or I might be examining a flower in great detail. I’m not sure I can tell the difference!

Who are you? lovely apple!

After a day’s marmalade making and campervan maintenance yesterday, this was supposed to be a day’s R&R, but a fateful discussion with our neighbour Charlie over coffee this morning sent us back home on a mission to cook the last of our stored apples before they became the object of another of my great interests in moulds. These apples still lack a conclusive name in spite of searching all the databases we could find. We have, I think, narrowed it down to two possibilities – either the French/Belgian dessert apple Api Noir but more likely the American apple Arkansas Black. The reason for ranking them that way is that the apple we picked has the most extraordinary flavour of vanilla, but to be honest there’s not much information to be had on either variety except that Chris Bowers’ nursery sells the French one and no-one that I can find sells the other American one – which is a real shame because (aside from its size) it’s got everything going for it; self-pollinating, disease resistant and late flowering and therefore fruiting avoiding frosts. Api Noir is counted mainly as a decorative apple, but Arkansas Black is rated for its flavour. The downside is that it’s a very small apple and so a bother to peel and core. On the other hand it’s so sweet we cook it without any added sugar and it keeps it shape and soft texture even after cooking – a bit like the English Cox apple. The right hand photo at the top gives an impression of this but also looks like a plate of witchetty grubs which is so wrong!

It happened that our neighbour Charlie had just acquired several books from the Marcher (as in Welsh/English border counties) Apple Network and so our conversation inexorably slanted towards apples and our common interest in them. We had a bag of the American apple hanging in a bag in the dangerously warm and damp kitchen and as soon as we got home I sorted the rotters, washed the rest and after a ploughman’s’ lunch we set to to peel and core them and then Madame cooked them with a knob of butter but no added sugar. The perfume of the apples is outrageous and develops even more during a couple or three weeks of storage so it’s well worth the additional effort of peeling them.

There’s very little point in trying to grow them from seeds because unfortunately most apples don’t come true – that’s why there are so many varieties. The only way to multiply them is to graft them on to established rootstocks which is a bit of a skilled operation. Nonetheless Madame is going to give it a try this coming year because she once learned how to do it at Long Ashton Cider Research Station. It would be a tremendous achievement to breed a new generation of these lovely apples but of course we don’t have space or the money to grow more than a couple of trees on the allotment.

The rest of my day was spent on homework with the biological records spreadsheet. It’s always been my way to learn by going back to first principles and then slowly building a picture in my mind. The disadvantage is that it makes me an agonisingly slow learner – but on the other hand when I’m done I know the subject with real fluency. I’ve come to regard my awkwardness as a strength rather than a weakness – but many of my old teachers would probably disagree!

Anyway, there will be stewed apple for supper today. I can’t wait.

On plants and parasites

For the most part, over the years, I’ve seen New Year more as a celebration that the old year is over and done with and that January 1st is no more than a blank canvas. But this time it was different because 2025 was pretty rubbish, what with innumerable health problems and having to spend a fortune getting the campervan fixed. By the end of the year the health problems along with the van repairs were largely sorted and we were free to resume our itinerant lives; gardening, exploring and recording wildlife and camping unencumbered by worries. It was an exhilarating feeling to be set free to imagine once again. The three resolutions of last year were largely fulfilled and I lay awake making excited plans for 2026.

So after the most optimistic start to 2026, I had a sudden attack of dust and ashes, partially caused by this plant. It’s called Greater Dodder and it was growing so inconspicuously down by the river I would probably never have noticed it. Fortunately the leader of the BSBI New Year plant hunt that we were on, clocked it and we all gathered around to see a very unusual (RR in the books) plant. We’ve seen its much more common relative in Pembrokeshire and North Wales but it was a lovely surprise to see it growing on our local patch. It’s a parasitic plant, related to bindweed (gardeners feel free to hiss) and this one grows especially on nettles.

However the excitement was followed almost straight away by the sense of disappointment that I hadn’t found it for myself. Anyway I photographed it and when we got home looked it up in the books and discovered that it’s been here near the river in Bath for a few years at least and that it prefers growing near water. In fact – to borrow a term from the police procedurals on the telly – it’s got form – a great reminder that the more you know about wildlife preferences the more likely you are to find what you’re looking for.

And so the roller coaster in my brain continued for a while as I pondered how to record it – and as spring follows winter the idea dropped into my mind that it would be a good idea to extend my database to include all the other things we find on our walks; birds, fungi, insects, ferns, slime moulds ( a recent obsession) and lepidoptera because we’ve now got a portable moth trap that won’t take up too much space in the campervan.

It sounds so easy doesn’t it? extend the database which lives in a spreadsheet file so that instead of having to open separate files for each interest, it all sits on one very large spreadsheet so I could, for example, look at everything we found on a certain day, or everything we’ve ever found in a certain place; I could assemble lists for every purpose and even draw pie charts. I was (temporarily) on fire at the possibility of using AI to do all the heavy lifting and slept very badly, basking in the excitement and imagining fine days in Cornwall walking down to Percuil, looking for orchids and listening to the Curlews calling on the mud flats; or in the Bannau Brycheiniog watching the mist below in the valleys or in North Wales feasting on wild mushrooms and watching gannets dive bombing the sea.

That lasted as long as it took to sit in front of the computer and figure out how to do it. My grasp of spreadsheets and how to manipulate them is minimal to non-existent. I am at the sub-beginner level – I just make lists – so I started slowly by finding out that a tab on a spreadsheet is not the same as a tab on a beer can or the one on an ancient typewriter and I set up a new tab (page) marked fungi and tried to copy and paste my list of fungi into the newly named “Biological Records” spreadsheet – oooh posh! – where it promptly fragmented and after a bit of blokey random key pressing disappeared altogether. A frantic reverse ferret move revived the patient but everything was in the wrong columns. It dawned on me that I was in for an agonising long haul – studying things that I really don’t like in order to study better the things that interest me most. No pixie dust, just slog and brain fog like learning to solve differential equations in school.

Dodder – Cousin Bronwyn from West Wales beasting the Gorse.

Self doubt closely resembles Dodder and its cousin in the photo at the top, Lesser Dodder. It coils around your brain and sucks it dry; replacing the creative juices with dust. Like Restharrow – a different tangle of a plant that does what it says on the tin and stops a horse-drawn harrow in its tracks. It’s the curse of all self-taught people to defer instinctively to the careless wisdom of those who had an academic career in gnats’ navels and who believe their qualifications trump the more common muddy boots kind of knowledge gained by the hoi polloi. [That should properly read ….. ‘gained by hoi polloi’ because hoi is the definite article in Greek, but if I wrote it that way I’d be denounced as a pedant]. And so we, the great unwashed, struggle with the pronunciation of long binomial names like Pseudoperonospora humuli and remain silent rather than have a go at it. The trick is to put the stress on the third syllable before the last and say it with conviction. The political theorist and philosopher Gramsci called people like us “organic intellectuals”. It’s a term I’m proud to embrace because it puts me in the company of the miners and railway workers, the millers and machinists and labourers who taught themselves to the highest levels and founded institutes and even invented the health services, ambulance clubs, cooperatives and friendly societies that protected their communities from hardship and exploitation by hard-nosed industrialists, the parasitic human subspecies of Dodder.

After a couple of hours trying to get my head around the entirely unfamiliar vocabulary of computer spreadsheets I didn’t just feel depressed, I felt stupid. I’d still got a mountain of identifications to do with no prospect of getting everything done before the new season kicks off in earnest. But then Madame suggested a walk and that lifted the mood. It’s been very cold with icy winds for days, but there’s been abundant sunshine and we’ve had some lovely walks along the river. Slowly the precious feeling of optimism and hope warmed our fingers and toes and we began to talk about journeys waiting to be made. I will get the spreadsheet working, write my million words and we will make our planned travels around the galleries and churches of Wales to see the cruelly unacknowledged glories of Welsh art. We will hunt for birds and plants, moths and butterflies as if we were in the Amazon jungle, and we’ll dip our feet in the sea again like we did when we were teenagers in awe of the turquoise sea and dracaenas of Falmouth.

Too old for that sort of malarkey? My dears, you have no idea!

Christmas at the Potwell Inn

Mistletoe

Geoffrey Grigson lists so many myths, folklore fragments and healing properties for mistletoe that after the second dozen I gave up counting them. Many of them were concerned with fertility, citing the similarity between mistletoe berries and what he coyly calls the male part. I’ve tried to verify that by looking at photos (of plants, of course) but I don’t really get that one; unless he had some uniquely blessed male friends with an extra testicle for luck! However if mistletoe gives license for a kiss I’m all in favour as long as it’s between consenting friends. Never inflame a temptation unless you’re free to yield to it has always been my motto.

Grigson, whose book “The Englishman’s Flora” lives on my desk, wasn’t writing a botanical textbook. The reason his book is so useful is because it’s a work of anthropology; examining how how and why plants have been used in the past – which often also explains how or why they got their names. Just one example is Figwort – which doesn’t make much sense until you look at the tight purple rinsed flower and then discover that “fig” was one of many ways of describing piles and so it was thought (via the doctrine of signatures) that it would cure that very common and uncomfortable condition.

Anyway, enough of that! Christmas has come and still lingers like a houseguest with a toothbrush for a few more days before we all secretly breathe a sigh of relief and get on with our boring and predictable lives. The Potwell Inn, as always, was especially busy with overnight guests; some of them sons. Partners and children were visited and hugged on Boxing day. It’s conventional for clergy (and retired ones like me) to moan about the workload, and it’s true; Christmas was always hard going with up to 20 carol services. Christmas Eve was particularly heavy going with services at 8.00am, 10.00am 4.00pm and 11.30pm followed by no more than four hours sleep and then four more in the morning. Then, because I was constantly up and around until 3.00am and then again at 7.00am , it always fell to me to attend to the turkey, cook gammon and feed the five thousand between services until I finally got home, tyres smoking from roaring around narrow country lanes and share a bottle of celebratory champagne after which I would finish cooking dinner rather drunkenly, discover I wasn’t really hungry any more and fall asleep.

Christmas cooking can’t be fully described without talking as Geoffrey Grigson did with a form of culinary anthropology in mind. Coincidentally – or perhaps importantly, Geoffrey the poet was married to Jane Grigson the cookery writer who did understand that there was more to Christmas cooking than a few ingredients. Cooking is regional, familial, historical and associated with powerful spiritual connections because Christmas, solstice, yule and so on are all associated with a key moment in the calendar – the slow return of longer days. Farm workers, for instance, were often laid off in the weeks surrounding winter solstice and so Plough Monday – the day the plough was brought into Christian churches to be blessed; signifies that turning point in the agricultural year.

Every year the bookshops are flooded with Christmas recipe books, and yet – apart from a few novel bells and whistles – most of them miss the point altogether. Very few food writers have explored the deep connection between the recipes and the cultures that brought them into being. Cooking is an important aspect of anthropology and very few food writers have grasped that essential fact. Cooks will, for instance, try to tweak the Christmas pudding with a novel ingredient or two and describe the dish as “essential” without even attempting to answer the question “why is that?” One of the few, and one of my favourite food writers is Patience Gray. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about another of my favourite food writers who also managed to unite the recipe with a sense of the history and culture of a place; she was called MFK Fisher, an American writer who wrote some fine books about French cookery traditions. I’ve long thought that there must be some kind of genealogy for cookery writers and I even had a bash at creating one a couple of years ago. The piece I wrote is called “About a Book” and you can easily reach it with the linked title here. The titles of all the books and their writers are all in that incomplete list. These writers, and especially Patience Gray who lived much of her life in Puglia, penetrated the deep roots of the cultures they were writing about. Their books would still have been an inspiration without a single recipe – although I’m so glad they left their accounts. Modern cookbooks with their rich and unctuous photographs and endless hybrid ingredients make me feel queasy.

This year I missed my parishes more than ever before. Ten years into retirement we’ve finally reset our lives and I’m able to look back with a degree of detachment and write that with a few exceptions I loved every moment. I never saw myself as a great theologian – I was far too given to exploring heretical ideas for that. Real faith, it seems to me should bear a close resemblance to Odysseus’ wife Penelope weaving, or rather not weaving the burial shroud for her father Laertes in the Odyssey. If it’s not unpicked regularly, you’ll risk being hooked up with a dud, or a foolish or even a sociopathic religious sect. But with my background in community arts, I knew from the outset that the skill set needed for a full church is pretty much the same as it is for a full pub, and my preaching was always inspired and inflected by everyday conversations, about ordinary things with people I’d grown to love, however annoying they could sometimes be. Leaving them was a profound bereavement. Perhaps the Potwell Inn was the consolation I needed.

There is, of course, a strongly ritualistic element in Christmas cooking; much of it leaning on family memories of the past. For years we mentioned the possibility to our three grown-up sons that we might change the Christmas day menu. They were invariably horrified at the thought and so it was turkey every year until lockdown when I cooked Mexican just for Madame and me. It felt very naughty! Aside from that there are a slew of memories that we honour in the weeks preceding Christmas. Making Christmas cake and Christmas puddings demands the making of wishes, and thankfully we no longer have to lift the steaming puddings out of the wash boiler with a bleached white copper stick hooked into a looped knot in old torn sheets. These days we use the pressure cooker which still retains at least some of the drama.

On Christmas Eve I cook a piece of gammon; sometimes roasted in the oven and sometimes poached in cider, always flavoured with cloves, peppercorns, bay, star anise and sage. The leftover stock or meat juices are kept for lentil soup. That’s supper and breakfast in one. Then the stuffings are prepared echoing with memories of Elizabeth David; the giblets poached with a few root veg to complement the gravy and all set out in the cold ready for the morning. On Christmas morning the bird is stuffed, the pigs in blankets rolled in bacon painted with mustard and the steam begins to run in rivulets down the windows. Then there is roasting, basting and prodding and poking with the thermometer until we are all agreed that the bird is cooked and the roasties crisp. Gluttony follows as night follows day and then the blazing Christmas pud and for those with elasticated bellies, sherry trifle. Christmas dinner is liturgical; we know it’s not real life but for a few blissful hours we can pretend it is.

The sherry trifle is made from a recipe given to me by Gill, an old friend, many years ago and which has been riveted on to the menu for decades. The biggest problem is sourcing the crystallised angelica without which it just doesn’t look right. The last time I found any (in Penzance) I bought the whole stock, so now I need to begin the search again. Oh and cheap glacé cherries are dyed with a kind of red stain that leaches quickly into the whipped cream spoils it.

Then on Boxing Day inevitably cold turkey with bubble and squeak after which we strip the remaining meat from the bones and make about a gallon of stock, some of which we use as broth the next day, and the rest of which is reduced and frozen in cubes for later.

So that’s the menu for our lump standard Christmas dinner, but there’s another ingredient which carries even more emotional baggage, because on Boxing Day especially we eat pickles.

There are no eat-by dates on pickles and chutneys at the Potwell Inn. we open them up and if they’re not sporting a flora of moulds we taste them and they’re almost always OK. Chutneys can be awfully raw at the beginning but they greatly improve with age, and I can always remember each batch in the making. Years ago I bought a gross of honey jars with tin lids which will corrode pretty soon when in contact with vinegar fumes so we’ve learned to keep the honey jars for jams, jellies and marmalade and keep pickles and chutneys in Kilner jars with rubber seals. We grow our own red and white currants on the allotment; alongside beans, cucumbers, chillies, carrots, courgettes. Plums and damsons come from our friends in Severnside, along with medlars which we blet for two or three weeks until they’ve gone soft. The bletting, brining and cooking can take ages but once finished and bottled they’ll keep for years and in the autumn, when the cupboards are full, they lend a feeling of continuity and security as well as adding unique flavours to a lunch of bread and cheese. With this kind of food we dine with our ancestors. We inherited the thriftiness of our parents who lived through shortages and it’s heartbreaking to think that future generations may miss that strange comfort of making leftovers taste lovely.

So time now for me to cook supper – and meanwhile we at the Potwell Inn wish all our friends big hugs and restrained kisses and to all our readers a very happy Christmas and New Year.

happy solstice!

I guess this is a kind of Solstice card – although it’s been a gloomy, cold and wet day; the kind you’re happiest to see the back of. I woke up at 4.00am with a dream in which the only thing I remember is someone or something saying “you can’t argue with a blackthorn”. I have no idea what that was about except that it’s impossible to force your way through a thicket of them because they’re so horribly spiny. Equally the fruits are completely unapproachable unless steeped in sugar and gin. The other notable thing about the blackthorn is the folk name “blackthorn winter” which according to Geoffrey Grigson in “The Englishman’s Flora” (other genders are available), expresses an ancient association of plants with seasons. The links are more often to do with the medicinal properties or with the supernatural which often overlap. Mistletoe is listed in the same book with countless properties including aphrodisiac and as a “heal all” from the time of the earliest herbals, but Grigson takes a very dim view of the druidic movement as it freely invented folklore, irrevocably clouding the real history.

Actually a Lenten rose

There are others of course – outside the flat today we had winter jasmine, cyclamen and even a few hardy geraniums on the window ledge. Grigson’s pick included the Christmas Rose and of course holly and ivy, traditionally brought indoors in winter to protect the woodlands for spring. I haven’t got a picture of a Christmas rose, which is the white flowered variety but in the same family the Lenten rose was in flower on the allotments today and is a member of the buttercup family; traditionally grown next to the front door to ward off evil spirits.

The solstice manages to condense astronomy, folklore and pagan religion in a single moment of time which, today, was 15.03 so apologies for the late arrival of this greeting. Let’s hunker down now until the blackthorn appears.

Losing my religion

Out, out, brief candle. Candlesnuff fungus Xylaria hypoxylon
Warning. This post includes a discussion of grooming and abuse

We binge-watched a whole four part thriller last night on TV. It was my fault. I fancied something like an Agatha Christie without the drawing room scene and just for fun I used Google Gemini to search for something suitable. There followed a typical AI dialogue where I refined my choice on the basis of a few questions and finally I settled on “near the sea” “cosy whodunnit” “wet weather allowed” and one series dropped into the the slot. It was “The Long Call”, based on an Ann Cleeves novel, set in Devon near the sea (I suspected Braunton Burrows but I couldn’t be sure), complete with rain – oh and one last detail that grabbed my attention – set around a religious community.

And off it went with some great actors and even accurate Devon accents. There was a body on the beach and it all looked very promising until we were introduced to the religious community which was very strict, inward looking and eerily familiar to me. It quickly became clear that everyone was lying and that there was enough passive aggression going on to freeze a small lake. My position as a viewer was so completely compromised that I even imagined myself sitting in one of the chairs in the midst of a Brethren style prayer meeting, listening to the endlessly repetitive petitions of a charismatic leader. I’d been there, worn the T shirt and carried the same alienated feelings as the investigating detective who’d been shunned (that’s a technical term with huge menace) by that same community after he came out as gay when a teenager. It was tremendously well researched in the way that vulnerable people were love bombed and befriended, groomed; then became the victims of passive aggression until they were demoralised, subdued and controlled. The next step, because this pattern isn’t confined to religious groups, is violence, abuse and in the worst case murder.

I was pre-teen, pre-puberty, but nonetheless awash with guilt at sins I didn’t think I’d ever committed – and didn’t have the vaguest idea how to commit – and that I could be certain that I was destined, or predestined for hell. Unconditional love, forgiveness and diversity were as underused in the congregation as a Bishop’s bible, although we all knew that bishops were a bad thing and the torments of hell were always good for a spittle infused, red-lipped sermon. Years later I found an antique copy of the hymn book they used which was so full of sado masochistic imagery it would probably be banned today. If I learned anything at Sunday School it was that I was a wrong un and no-one would answer the question “why?” because that was the sin of disobedience.

I left Sunday School as soon as I was able to defy my parents and took nothing away with me except that diffuse sense of guilt into the future. I caught a glimpse of a better looking god in the local anglican church, but that was more to do with fancying a girl in the choir. I got confirmed, took communion once and never went back. Around that time I was groomed by a much older teenager and introduced to a number of dodgy men but fortunately he was arrested before anything too terrible happened. After that I joined a Wesleyan methodist youth club whose saintly leaders kept me safe. We had a fancy dress party once and Mrs Round said “I suppose you’ll be coming as the devil, Dave” . Finally I discovered the meaning of fornication (Oh happy day!/ what happened there?) and after getting chucked out of school over a provocative samizdat magazine which I wrote, published and distributed I met Madame at a CND meeting and we fell unfashionably but hopelessly in love. I was 18 and she was 15. On reflection I was unbelievably lucky to get off the escalator when I did although that didn’t stop the police, and much later the church authorities from treating me as a risk, mainly to their reputation as worthy chaplains to the status quo.

I was about 12 years old when they interviewed me with the utmost hostility at the police station. My Dad was there, but sat silently throughout and when they let me go he never subsequently mentioned the way they had shamed me. Much later on I was a member of a support group for clergy which was supposed to be completely confidential; a safe space led by two skilled therapists. I finally managed to describe what had happened to me then, and also the occasion when I’d unexpectedly encountered one of the paedophiles I had been introduced to during a visit to his mother. This was very upsetting. Even decades later I recognised him instantly. One of the members of the group took it upon themselves to report what I’d said to the church authorities without even warning me. As a result I was telephoned by a church appointed social worker who quizzed me on what seemed to be the prior assumption that the abused were likely to become abusers themselves. In reality both the police and the church authorities became the abusers, forcing me to recall the events without offering a shred of support afterwards. Any trust in the group disappeared and I was on my own again. Completely innocent and yet groomed to blame myself.

As a consequence of all this inside experience of religious communities and controlling behaviour, a large part of my time has been devoted to patching people up; many of them had been horribly abused and robbed of all self-respect. Many of them drifted right back into abusive relationships, but I think I may have made a difference to a few. After the film last night I went to bed feeling thoroughly churned up.

What is it about religion that makes it so dangerous? so corrosive to young minds? I suspect that living without certainties is hard going so shortcutting from judgements of virtue to the ‘either/or’ rules of us and them is an easy way out of difficult thoughts. Madame and I were down in Southern Ireland once, during the Troubles, and we were in a remote bar way south when a group of IRA supporters came in. It was a terrifying hour whilst we sat and they sang anti British songs, us not daring to speak or get another drink for fear of being recognised by our accents. The next day I went back to apologise to the owner for causing a lot of stress and she said it was no problem. I replied “well, we are English” and she said “No but you’re tourists“. I’m still working that one out.

But there is the real reason for the danger of religion. It’s not theology, it’s the binary culture it generates – with its inside/outside, lost/saved, stranger/friend, infidel and faithful. In a world full of anger and hatred it’s all too easy to fall into camps which become gangs – each with its own flags and banners and then guns and bombs.

This morning we were having a cup of tea with our friend Charlie who managed to combine both creativity and science into his life. We were having a conversation about slime moulds – yes you read that right – and we agreed that the earth is so prodigiously beautiful whether you’re looking at an ocean, a mountain or a microscopic cell; and when we consider the almost infinite adaptations and evolutionary steps involved in getting to where we are – then there really is no need to suppose that some kind of kindly, interfering or even malevolent being, could add anything to the picture. By all means use an obvious metaphor, like Mother Nature for instance but I remember saying to someone once about a girlfriend known by everyone as “Peach” – that her name didn’t imply that she lived in a fruit bowl. The sea of faith seemed to be retreating for me. Much later I discovered that the tide comes in twice a day.

The melancholy soft, withdrawing roar – not, in this instance on Dover beach.

The good life myths that hide the reality

We want change but we want nothing altered – William Cobbett

Three Cornish pasties

I was shocked today to discover that I have a bit of an obsession with food. My shock was brought about by the sheer number of food photographs I’ve taken while I was looking for pictures to illustrate this post on the subject of what’s come to be known as Regional Food after reading a piece in the Guardian about a recently published book by the Italian academic Alberto Grandi called La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist). He argues that in reality there was no substantial Italian cuisine (the choice of the French term ‘cuisine’ rather gives the game away). What we know as the rather mythic pasta + nonna idea came into existence when so many utterly impoverished migrants left italy and arrived in America where they experienced an abundance of food for the first time. I’ve seen that happen myself. Back in the eighties I was on a course with students from all over the world and one of them was from Eastern Europe. He kept going missing but we could always find him gazing into the window of a local butcher – he’d never seen anything like it. He was so overwhelmed with the abundance of our food that we would take extra each meal and pass it to him. Grandi describes that cultural collision as you might describe an F1 hybrid. Two less productive strains interbreeding can bring about fantastically productive offspring. He’s not saying that there is no Italian food tradition, but that – real as it may be today – it’s not very old. It got me thinking about other so-called traditions that you would never have found in their alleged countries of origin – Balti and Korma owe more to Birmingham than to India; most French haute cuisine can be attributed to the unemployed chefs of the post revolutionary vanquished rich. Fusion cooking to the collision of Australia with Japan; Chinese cooking which came to be known and popularised by waves of immigrant chefs in chip shops but which barely scratched the surface of the diverse cultures of such a huge nation. And then there’s the great unwashed – the tradition of english cooking.

My mind travelled back almost immediately to William Cobbett, radical, grumpy and outrageously opinionated pamphleteer as well as hilariously funny writer. In Cottage Economy he tried to set out the proper diet for an Englishman and got very indignant about potatoes which he thought made farm labourers weak and lazy, and the drinking of tea which he said made women into gossips and made men become effeminate. For Cobbett, the only proper diet was based on bread, bacon and beer; grown, fattened and brewed by the happy labourer. The two books, “Cottage Economy” and “Rural Rides“; written in the shadow of poverty and starvation after years of war are still worth reading if only for a glimpse of his burning indignation. Bacon and eggs, Sunday Roast, good bread and plenty of meat became the iconic staples of the English diet, especially in the wake of wartime rationing. Meat and two veg was at least factually accurate even when it became a snide insult. It was the diet I grew up on.

Heaven forfend – chillies, borlotti, passata – what’s the world coming to?

Madame had more contact with an alternative tradition because one of her aunts had married into money, and she spent holidays as a companion for a cousin. It was whilst staying there (just the once) that I read Mrs Beeton and wondered at the extravagance of some of the recipes – “take a dozen eggs and three pints of best cream” – that kind of thing. I didn’t laugh at it – I wanted some of it for us too. After we got married and realized that neither of us could cook, a friend gave us some Elizabeth David and so now my list of inspirational writers extends to dozens, and they fill bookcases in the flat.

As for English cuisine; looking through the photos I’d say there is still a very diverse history of English cooking. After Mrs Beeton; Eliza Acton, Jane Grigson, Dorothy Hartley are among many more food writers who kept the tradition alive and many others have carried on to the present day. Even if there never was a properly understood traditional cuisine, there was always an uncollated mass of good recipes made excellent with fresh vegetables, meat and fish. As ever, cooking and eating what’s to hand and affordable – fish or lamb, pork or beef depends on a wealth of non-culinary variables and the lazy journalistic trick of listing the best of everything from trifles to testicles is just silly. Even a bucket of offal, like the one below, when respectfully and creatively prepared and cooked, can be a feast. (It can also be terrible – trust me).

Patés, cakes, puddings, toad in the hole, cheeses, faggots and bread with all manner of vegetables are still on the Potwell Inn menu. In the last three days we had Sunday roast; liver and onions and then – classical leftover food- cold chicken with bubble and squeak and home made chutney. Shopping and cooking, then sharing a meal with friends and family is one of the great creative joys of being alive. Slow food needs to be accompanied by slow eating.

But food – like every other aspect of culture in the UK – is deeply influenced by social class. Back in the 80’s we were living (as ever) in a block of flats and upstairs there was another tenant who came from a profoundly different and bourgeois background. We got on pretty well in general but one day she came down to see us about something just as we were making some food for my parents. Later her husband came down in fits of laughter and told us that she’d rushed upstairs and said “R – You have to go down and see Dave and his wife, they’re making a real working class tea! It was the tinned salmon sandwiches that did for us, I think. Major class signifier!

The problem today is not so much which recipes people cook, but that so many people don’t cook at all. The traditional meat and two veg diet was pretty boring, but properly cooked it’s still a nutritious meal, unlike the ultra processed foods that are slowly poisoning a whole generation and inexorably lowering the quality and life-expectancy of the life of the poor but also the well paid but chronically overworked people in the middle . The challenge is that when you’re struggling to pay the rent there just isn’t time to bone a breast of lamb, let alone grow an allotment and when you’re working 12 hours a day and six days a week like many professionals have to do; then time, not money is the limiting factor.

But eating out can be a far more dispiriting experience even than a takeaway – what with the virtual extinction of properly trained chefs. Two of our sons are chefs and they tell us that many young people looking for jobs have never eaten good food, and are unaware that kitchens are dangerous places in which hot fat, slippery floors and sharp knives can cause serious injury.

So I’m not saying that regional cuisines don’t exist, but that in the hands of skilled and well read cooks and chefs, a miracle can happen in which local English foods, like lamb, bacon, thyme, potatoes and carrots with the addition of a glass of wine and some garlic , can be inflected with the flavours of Provence and become carbonnade nimoise. Regional food is a dance performed by a skilled and knowledgeable cook, a selection of local fresh produce and a well equipped kitchen informed with wisdom and love.

Sherry trifle – one sponge, one bottle of sherry? The glacė angelica took a bit of finding!

Now that’s a nose Cyrano de Bergerac

Macro photo taken with an Olympus TG-7 , others on a Pixel 6a

It’s a bit confusing, but if you look carefully at the lower right hand photo you’ll see a moth on its back and then if you look left at the big macro-photo you’ll see the full glory of a Hummingbird hawk moth’s proboscis which looks like a roll of liquorice. I suppose to be pedantic. the moth’s nose is located in its antennae, and the proboscis is used for reaching deep into the nectar glands of flowers that other moths can’t reach. The dark patch at the end is probably the rather complex part called the sensilia which is used to locate and sample the nectar. The sensitivity of the antennae is so great that the male can detect a female up to 7 miles away. But enough science. Our son brought this deceased example to us after work in a busy restaurant where it had expired on the stairs. The patch of red on its back seems to result from damage while being wrapped in tissue. A little bit of research revealed that this moth is by no means a rarity in Bath. What’s especially pleasing is that the food plants include Buddleia; Red Valerian; Honeysuckle; Lilac; Lavender and Phlox For caterpillars, Lady’s Bedstraw; Hedge Bedstraw and Wild Madder are their primary food source all of them (except wild Madder which I haven’t seen here), can be found among the rogues and vagabonds in Bath. I’ve never seen one flying let alone feeding so perhaps an experimental pot of Valerian in front of the trail cam might be a good idea.

This could be the beginning of yet another list because one of my birthday presents was a portable Skinner moth trap which folds flat and won’t take up too much room in the camper van. Isn’t it great that the winter solstice is in only six days on December 21st, and what’s especially exciting is that the solstices aren’t just a day on the calendar but a moment. At exactly 3.03pm the earth will have dropped to its lowest position in relation to the sun and from then on – or at least until the summer solstice, we’ll have more and more lovely daylight and a new season for plant hunting and growing crops on the allotment. The fungi are all-but over now but I’ve still got to identify and record about 100 of them from photos. Actually at this stage of my experience I’ll probably spend most of my time discovering how my photos managed to completely miss the most important features.

As we discovered with the trail cam on the allotment, there’s an awful lot going on at night that we never see and so the moth trap will enable us to photograph and record the nocturnal moths which are often significant pollinators. I should add that the moths enter the trap, attracted by the light, and are drawn inside where they find some egg boxes where they spend the night. Then, after they’ve been photographed and identified they’re released back into the wild completely unharmed.

Madame has offered what the police call “words of advice” about my last post which she thinks was a bit too dense for a comfortable read, and so I may take it down and split it into smaller chunks. We’ll see – but I know I easily get overexcited with a topic and forget where the brakes are. Someone once told me that my sermons reminded them of being engulfed by the spirit of Thomas Hardy. I thought it was quite a compliment but I was thinking she meant “Under the Greenwood Tree” and she was probably thinking of Jude the Obscure”!