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After a couple of weeks of waiting for the weather to improve, last night was the last grey and ill tempered shot from the gods before the promised heatwave makes life intolerable from a different direction. We’ve known for some time that the rooflight dome in the campervan is cracked, but at midnight the stormy rain started to drip relentlessly on the bed. We got up, shoved half a roll of kitchen roll where we hoped it would help; covered the bed with a waterproof picnic rug and went back to sleep. At three o’clock the rain hammered down again and the drip resumed. Sleeping while holding a washing up bowl is not a skill either of us have learned, so we found another roll of kitchen cloths and replaced the temporary dam.

We’ve had worse nights in tents of course. One pancaked in a storm and we spent the rest of the night listening to World Service on the radio while we held the flapping fabric away from the sleeping children. We became overnight authorities on some kind of African flea species. Another tent actually split in half in a fierce storm – so a leak in the campervan is, historically, not such a big deal. Our closest shave was when lightning struck a child’s bike just feet away and almost melted parts of it. That night we went to bed at a crowded campsite and woke up to an almost empty field. It wasn’t so much courage and resilience – I just didn’t really want to spend more time with the Mothers’ Union.

Anyway, after waking early for the third time to a slate grey sky and yet more sea mist; our hopes for something better were rewarded and, as I write this, the sky is clearing in defiance of the weather forecast. My inner Eeyore says it won’t last.

I like to go to bed on a positive thought, (see previous sentence), and so last night’s was the sudden realization, as I plodded around to the chemical disposal point with a full cludger, that my long standing habit of silently naming the plants as I pass them has extended to a few more grasses after a couple of weeks of intense work. Everybody except one thinks that grasses are hard, but I was challenged and inspired years ago by the “one” a fine teacher who dismissed my difficulties with the words “Oh … grasses are easy!” – and they are, provided you’re prepared to put the hours in.

As I think back to my childhood, back in the days when children were allowed to wander freely, playing wherever we liked as long as we turned up for meals, grasses were probably the first plants I knew; not by name (especially Latin names) but by purpose. Wall Barley provided darts to throw at one another, False Oat grass was great for stripping seeds with a finger and thumbnail and putting them down your best friend’s neck and the wide leaves could be plucked, held between your thumbs and blown into making loud screeching noises. Aside from grasses there was the ever reliable Cleavers which you could surreptitiously attach to someone’s jumper and Old Man’s Beard whose canes you could smoke just like all the grownups did. childhood is the place to start botanising – not smoking! – for sure.

Earlier this week we passed a couple and had a brief conversation about how dense and varied the wildflowers here are. She told me that she’d counted twelve different grass species on a walk the previous day. In her childhood she’d been really absorbed by finding plants and sticking them in her scrap-book. She didn’t know what the names of any of the grasses were but that really didn’t seem to matter. There is, I’m sure, a tremendous latent interest in plants but we don’t seem to be building a bridge towards beginners but tend to speak an arcane language and sound too clever by half instead of using English plant names and even telling the stories of how they got them. I ‘m sure if you shared the fact that Cuckoo Pint got its name from”pintle” which is the shaft which is (dare I say) inserted into the rudder- that “cuckoo” is a polite word for an adulterer and that one of its other many names is “Parson in the pulpit” you’d surely remember the name forever and then if you really needed to you could easily discover it’s also called Arum maculatum when it’s being used scientifically. It’s significant that one of the best and most entertaining books on English plant names was written by Geoffrey Grigson who was a poet. Plants aren’t just objects of study, but they feed us, heal us and make a walk in the countryside an aesthetic adventure.

So not surprisingly the first plant I was able to identify easily was False Oat-grass because I already knew what it was; just not what it was called. I could list the rest easily but only because in childhood they represented useful things like itchy powder and bows and arrows. We brewed elderberries in tin cans and puddle water and pretended it was wine and we scrumped apples in the abandoned orchards of a bombed house just up the road.

This weekend a large group of primary schoolchildren and their parents shipped up at the campsite and took over maybe fifteen pitches. The children’s voices filled the air and it was lovely as they kicked a ball around, threw water bombs at each other and annoyed the hell out of their mums and dads who just wanted to sit around and drink prosecco. Yesterday I made a collage of photographs of my first grass to celebrate its (and my) existence. It was good and that just leaves the other 2000 or so species to find and record. Back on the road tomorrow early and then the builders are coming on Tuesday to finish up the work that’s been waiting ten years. Then in the afternoon I’m off to the hospital for them to look at the cataract growing in one of my eyes. I’m so looking forward to be able to resolve distant objects once more.

I was reading a new book this week – I know I could have said that any time in the last ten years and it would still have been true. I read a lot – period! Anyway this week I’ve been concentrating on Sarah Whild’s new handbook on biological recording and loving it apart from a creeping doubt whether I’d ever make the grade. Amateurs like me often face a Catch 22 situation where we find ourselves in an endless circular difficulty in which it seems (from reading this book) that the key to getting records accepted is to have a good reputation. How do you get a good reputation? Why of course by having lots of records accepted. We stand on the edge of the magic circle waving like a rapidly wilting wallflower; D listers in a school prom, and never being chosen.

I mean, I don’t mind too much because I’m not the train spotting type and I’m not even sure I’d like to be recognised for my botanical efforts alone. There are too many other non-wildflower subjects that I’m equally interested in. Sarah’s book is about the science of identifying and recording plants and goodness knows we need the science in this time of ecological crisis; but looking back at my long love affair with plants it seems to me that the true motivation was a combination of aesthetics and puzzles. When I first went to work as a very junior groundskeeper and school bus driver after leaving art school, I could easily identify Speedwells and Dandelions; enemies of the cricket square. However I learned very soon that not all Speedwells were the same, and more punishingly, that not all Dandelions are Dandelions. It was the struggle to tell apart and name the different members of their two families that really engaged me. It was a magnificent puzzle. The fact that almost all of them are extremely common and unworthy of the attention of the Magisterium made no difference – I loved the scruff-bags of the plant world, and I still do; probably because I’m a scruff-bag too. It also became apparent that Dandelions in particular are fiendishly difficult on account of their ability to clone themselves. I soon learned to walk on by!

So if I came to be a field botanist at all it was through trying to dig my way out of the slough of despond that all those Dandelion thingies inhabit, and when I hear one of the tweedies going large on their vast knowledge I retreat in case someone exposes my slim credentials. Imposter syndrome could have been invented just for me. I suspect I was a bit of a solitary from my earliest childhood and offering me a chance to do a course or take an exam would scare the living daylight out of me.

My real ambition is not to get an award or be recognised in the street. Years ago when I was doing a lot of slots and spots on BBC Radio, I was in the supermarket one day when a woman came around the corner after hearing me talk to someone and asked me – “are you Dave Pole?” – “Yes I am” – “ooh, I thought you were tall”. I am not tall. My only skill is as a communicator, although my several detractors would dismiss me as just being “clever with words.” Around the same time I was engaged on a project by the Bible Society who were recording the whole of the Bible. It felt less of an honour when I was told I would mainly be reading the devil’s voice. I’m quite sure that Jesus would have had a posh, English middle class voice but I never met my nemesis because I recorded alone in an empty studio and the editors joined all the bits together later. The only compliment came when I was told that my Gloucestershire accent went down a storm in Africa. A storm?

But this quest for a way of communicating hard ideas was the first glimmering of this blog. I was walking up on the River Severn when I found a row of abandoned concrete and steel barges hauled up on the banks at Purton. They were a sorry and desolate sight and I took loads of photos thinking how wonderful it would be if I could incorporate photos, text and HTML links in order to link the photographs as metaphors to illuminate the text. The links would be such that readers would be able to jump from place to place, choosing their own path through. I had to wait for years until the blogging technology came along and I’ve grown, along with the opportunities evolving programmes offered. My workflow always, without exception, begins with an image, a kind of Wordsworthian metaphor that acts as an armature for the writing. The hard ideas are what I’m really interested in and so my means are more creative than they are scientific. When I write about plants I’m often trying to shift a common misperception; to open up questions where there were once only answers. So I’m not so much offering answers to any particular questions but trying to suggest better ways of finding; better places to look for those answers. I use imagery from the allotment, the kitchen, the canal as well as our walks in which we are inevitably concerned with natural history not least plants; none of these in order to court celebrity but in the hope that readers can catch a glimpse of the power and the beauty of Nature. If I stray into the subject of Green Spirituality now and again it’s because I’m searching too.

Right now I’m experimenting with using my voice in some way, moving carefully towards video- who knows? I can blow the dust off my old devil voice once more or perhaps something a little less abrasive. There’s everything to play for.

This is a member of the Asteraceae but not a Dandelion.

This was one of those pieces that changes between the conception and the final result; largely because it’s so boring writing about the shitty state we’re all in, because we’re all in it so get over yourself!! So I set out in search of a word to describe my mental state because none of the usual ones fit. Just now I checked an online thesaurus and found around fifty possible words for being fed-up and, surprisingly only ten for whatever it is that’s the opposite. So in the normal state of being human is it really true that we need five times more words to express unhappiness than we do to communicate sheer joy? Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina “All happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. So clearly we actually need all those misery words for personal use even if we disregard the pathological criminality of so many of our politicians.

On the other hand, as a writer, I’m familiar with the challenge of coming up with just the right word to suit the situation and so, after a big think, I came up with one word from the much smaller happiness camp – that word is euphoria – and from there it was a short leap to its opposite – dysphoria. When in doubt go for the Greek and switch the prefixes. For me the word dysphoria reaches into parts that other words can’t reach and manages to incorporate such diverse and miserable coagulants as Thames Water, the British Labour party leadership, Donald Trump, and our neighbour who uses a fraudulent disabled parking badge – into the same enormous crock of shite that invades our daytime thoughts and disturbs our sleep.

But what’s the cure for this – well it sounds like “turn away Whittington, it’s not worth it”. And so we did turn away; cancelled the newspapers, shunned the mainstream media; devoted ourselves to the pursuit of euphoria and three days later we’re back in the Bannau Brycheiniog for a brief campervan-testing excursion – and it works! – the campervan at any rate. The media fasting works too – surprisingly well. The sun shone today and we stood on our long walk and simply listened to the birds – although, just to add a touch of reality to the arcadian dream we were on the Monmouth and Brecon canal which is closed at just the point where Ospreys are expected to nest again this year. You might have thought this was a way of minimising disturbance to the birds, but no; it’s down to a dispute between the Canal and River Trust in Wales (Glandwr Cymru) – a charity – and Welsh Water an allegedly non profit organisation which pushed up its charges to an eye watering £100,o00 per week during the drought for providing water to the canal from the river Usk. Just as a matter of interest, Welsh Water has been fined £40 million for its management failures around pollution and recently appointed to its Board the ex Chief Executive of the Environment Agency to which supervised and failed to control the enshittification of Thames Water et al. Just the man to get a regulatory grip on Welsh Water you might think.

So aside from these invasive and dysphoric thoughts and in the absence of much botanical interest apart from Lesser Celandines in profusion we walked on in pursuit of a bottle of milk and listened as woodpeckers drummed in the trees, Buzzards circled overhead and Robins, Blue Tits, Song Thrushes and a dozen other species strutted their stuff in the trees in the hope of attracting a mate. It was absolutely blissful to walk, stop and listen with occasional glimpses of Hay Bluff through the trees where a great deal of brash clearing has gone on. I saw my first ever Kingfisher here and have never forgotten the double-take of seeing and hardly believing its coat of many colours. I would not swap my battered dysphoria for all the bitcoin in the world.

This is the old Lizard lifeboat station which, curiously, was built on Polpeor cove facing into the prevailing wind. Launching a lifeboat into a southwesterly storm must have been extremely hazardous and after 100 years of deliberation the station was moved to the much safer Kilcobben Cove where the drop into the sea is as steep as a fairground ride, giving the crew several minutes to contemplate the heavy seas in which they are about to be lowered. On the plus side it’s more sheltered from the southwesterlies. Just walking past the station always induces a profound feeling of gratitude for the present crew as well as those of the past who risk, and sometimes lose their lives in order to save the lives of complete strangers. This photograph of the old lifeboat station popped up as I was trying to fix a faulty connection in my laptop and immediately appealed as a perfect image for virtue.

I may need to explain a bit about a word used by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who lived over two and a half thousand years ago and who discussed what kind of life brought us the most happiness. His word – eudaimonia – is often translated as flourishing which seems to me to be a much better and more fulfilling state of being than mere happiness. Aristotle taught that eudaimonia, flourishing, is best achieved by the pursuit of virtues. He listed between 12 and 15 of them but they are often summarized as : (This summary is provided by Google Gemini AI)

• Courage: The mean between cowardice (deficiency) and recklessness (excess).
• Temperance: The mean between insensibility (deficiency) and self-indulgence/intemperance (excess).
• Generosity/Liberality: The mean between stinginess (deficiency) and prodigality/wastefulness (excess).
• Magnificence: Spending money well.
• Magnanimity: Having a proper pride/high-mindedness.
• Right Ambition/Pride: The mean between lowliness and empty vanity.
• Good Temper: The mean between spiritlessness and irascibility.
• Friendliness: The mean between being surly and being a flatterer.
• Truthfulness: The mean between self-deprecation and boastfulness.
• Wit/Wittiness: The mean between boorishness and buffoonery.
• Friendship: A vital aspect of a good life.
• Justice: The virtue of treating others fairly and lawfully. 

See how often the concept of moderation comes up in that scheme, and also notice that it’s a very different form of teaching from, say, the ten commandments or on any kind of intensive definition of right and wrong – the thou shalt nots. Notice also that none of these is underwritten by any kind of deity. Revenge and punishment is replaced by failure to thrive. Aristotle was also very big on cultivating right habits, on practice of the virtues until they became second nature. Virtue is a non religious approach to human flourishing based on the cultivation of wise and moderate habits.

And your point is ….?

Well, my point arises from the depressing state we’re in around the world, and as a simple test for measuring virtue you could write a name, any name at the top of that list – a politician, a president, an industrial giant, a journalist , a teacher, a lawyer, even a former Attorney General – and work down the checklist of virtues putting a tick for every one that’s actually lived out rather than bragged about on a CV. You’re not going to wear a pencil out by adding ticks. . And the shortage of powerful role models is part of the reason that it’s so hard to live a virtuous life in this 21st century world and in consequence, why it’s so very hard to flourish because it’s so difficult to see virtuous people being virtuous. We never needed strong role models more than we do now and so often we’re on our own, making it up as we go along – like setting out from the Lizard in a kayak in a force eight storm. As my old friend and mentor Don Streatfield used to say “Everything in our favour’s against us!” That’s not an excuse for not even trying but it’s just a realistic appraisal of the cost of eudemonia, of flourishing.

Appropriately enough, you might think, in view of the Government’s present difficulties, we decided yesterday to watch the box-set of Alec Guinness as George Smiley in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. You might say “nothing changes” after reminding yourself of the spy scandals of Burgess, Maclean and Anthony Blunt; and yet Guinness’ masterful portrait of the quiet and thoughtful spy, George Smiley, would be an excellent example of virtue functioning in a headwind of dishonesty, violence, ambition, avarice and lies. It’s been making us all incredibly anxious. Perhaps I’ve been influenced by the quite wonderful arrangement of the Nunc Dimittis by Richard Burgon at the end of each episode which, almost tearfully, I decided I would have to be played at my funeral – in spite of no longer believing in that kind of god any more, and having never been any kind of faithful servant. I also thought that the Guinness version managed to cover a lot of moral and ethical ground without resorting to the usual tedious mix of psychopaths, car chases, explosions and gratuitous violence.

So I don’t think for a nanosecond that the remedy would be a religious revival, or stiffer punishments for lawbreakers. Aristotle’s suggestions already embody the moral and ethical core of all the main religions without the threats and sadistic sanctions being administered by a wrathful god. If we’re going to promote a green spirituality let it be consensual, non judgemental, rooted in relationships, especially with the earth. Let it be multifaceted, thoughtful and diverse and let it be rooted in the virtues. Let it be filled with music and poetry and song, and when we choose leaders let’s do on the basis of their virtue rather than their charisma or their wealth and power or on the worth to us of their empty promises.

 “Green spirituality” is a term that raises more questions than it settles. It is not any kind of fixed theological orthodoxy, which is so often suffocating waffle, but as a form of grasping at possible meanings in a modern spiritual crisis. In the face of advancing climate, economic, and political disasters, relying on rule-bound ethics or consequential ethics is insufficient. Instead, it suggests a return to “virtue ethics”—forming right habits and character through a way of life shaped by prudence, temperance, courage, and justice.

At its core, this spirituality is an attempt to find a way through the wreckage of a Western culture suffering from a loss of humanity. It emerges from the remainder of an experience—that part of life which refuses to be reduced to dimensions, probabilities, or logic and longs to be rediscovered in the whole of life. The spirituality of flourishing begins where the dogma ends, in a space made of love, wonder and gratitude. It’s not a primrose path, a post-hippy paradise of nice feelings. The Aristotelian virtues are more a marathon than a sprint and courage is not learned through peace and plenty.

Conclusion: The Mystical Remainder

Ultimately, green spirituality is an invitation to enter the mystery of existence. It is a call to move beyond the sacramental degraded into ritual and habit and instead embrace a life where the earthy, material, exhilarating phenomenon that we call Nature is allowed to speak directly to the human spirit. It is a quest for a state of being where one can “flourish” as a fully human part of a complex, dynamic, and interrelated system.

R.S. Thomas, one of my favourite poets lived on the Lleyn peninsula and was an inveterate walker and bird watcher all his life. I met him once; he had the driest sense of humour despite his grim reputation. One of his collections was called “The Laboratories of the Spirit” and contains the poem “The Moon in Lleyn” which could be read as a commentary on Matthew Arnold’s poem “On Dover Beach which I quoted a couple of posts ago. It’s a collection that explores the challenge of faith in a scientific and materialistic culture. Here’s a photo of his church and of the actual moon in Lleyn. He’s a wise and humane guide in a headwind.

You may have read this in the past few days but not seen any of the photos. Many apologies, but there’s been a bug in the software for which I’ve found a workaround for the time being.

In an unsettled age my childhood home changed its address from Bath Street to Teewell Avenue. That was when they knocked down the scrapyard at the end, which was piled high with surplus and unwanted Britannia aeroplane propellers, and they drove through to the real Teewell avenue by demolishing Rickford Kennels whose bird-bath was made from a large unexploded bomb painted maroon and cream to match the attached and undamaged bungalow.

So I was born in that liminal strip between city and countryside and lived my early years roaming between the miners’ cottages up the road and the derelict buildings behind them; or, if I was in the mood, the footpath to Charnhill passing the corset factory and into the countryside at Rodway Hill. At the end of the garden the old LMS railway line left the tunnel and made its way via the Pines junction to Bath where it terminated outside what I shall call Potwell Villas – a 1980’s vision of luxury living in concrete and steel where we now live. All of twelve miles without even crossing the tracks!

Now we have no garden but two allotments and a marvellous collection of wildflowers growing in the pavement outside the door. I counted sixteen species in a 25m stretch of pavement just before we left. In Bath Street the old gas street lamp marked the moment of decision; whether to turn right and head for the country or left and head into Bristol. But even such a simple decision turned out to be more complex than you’d think because the countryside was largely post-industrial and almost (in those days) post -coalmining. The city was still smouldering from the blitz and looked like some of the photos we now see of Kiev. Castle Green still boasted a civic canteen and a scaffolding boardwalk to keep citizens safe from falling into bombed-out basements. We, as children, took it all in our stride because it was our normal. Even the accordion players with one trouser leg pinned up with a large blanket pin were normal. I suppose we thought that was just the way some people turned out.

I became hefted, habituated to my normal; its culture, its history and its strong Gloucestershire accent; but above all to its wildlife – the sparrows generally, but its plants especially. They were the visual furniture of my childhood. I had no idea what any of them were called because my mum, brought up in deep countryside in the Chilterns was patterned differently. She knew all her plants by their Stoke Row names but probably wouldn’t have known the hedge mustards and wall barleys of my familiar pavements. But now, looking back, I envy her for knowing the Lady’s Slipper. So I went to school and became bi-cultural but I always walked and thought in my first language. If I get particularly puzzled by a local plant name now – not the Latin ones – I look it up in Grigson’s “Englishman’s Flora” as if I were ordering a coffee in Tarragona with the aid of a guidebook. My Mum’s family all lived in Stoke Row and had done since the 1700’s. They were carpenters, vernacular builders and part-time smallholders. My Dad’s family seem to have migrated to Bristol from Somerset some time in the 19th century and settled in Hotwells which was also half destroyed in the Blitz. Both sides of the family were of the gaffer but not the middle classes. Whichever way I went it was post-war, post industrial, liminal urban fallow.

All of which is a very long introduction to the fact that I just finished reading the book I mentioned yesterday – “Urban Plants” by Trevor Dines – published by Bloomsbury which, again, I can’t recommend too highly. Most people will read it as a first rate textbook on urban plants but, for me, it was a kind of botanical biography. As I tuned the pages I found the answer to my strange addiction to urban and post-industrial plants, aka weeds, because it miraculously riveted two halves of my memories together. The old man and the child still live in the same world; nothing is the same, but in the manner of the tides and seasons nothing has changed either. The old dram roads (tram roads but we have the soft mutation in Gloucestershire) are still largely there for walkers but no longer thrum with rusty tubs of coal from Coalpit Heath. Parkfield Rank still sits on top of the pits where Eddy, my closest friend, and I played dares miles from home. The old brickworks flues at the bottom of the escarpment which we loved to crawl up to peer at the sky are all gone, but the clay is still there. You can still pick up sherds of drainpipe where the kilns of Warmley once stood. Priddy Mineries and Velvet bottom are still capable of leaching dangerous quantities of cadmium into the water but aside from a few dogs and their owners and the cavers, no smelting has gone on for a century, Only the plants that can tolerate heavy metals tell the story as they eke out a living on the waste and slag.

It’s not that I don’t like “proper” flowers. One of my greatest pleasures is to walk the unimproved grassland of the Cotswold escarpment and, indeed, I see a lot of “proper” flowers on the Kennet and Avon Canal that enters the river Avon just down the road from Potwell Villas. I like them, I photograph and record them but ….. well they just don’t have that jolt of familiarity. Eddy and I used to catch the bus into Bristol and wander around the docks on a Saturday afternoon. If we walked down Gasferry Lane we would always see Buddleia growing out of the walls. There would always be Dandelions growing at the foot of the same Brandon Hill stone walls; three meters high to keep small boys out and the evil naphthalene polluted soil in.

I’ve never made a secret of my love for Cornwall yet, even there, I’m drawn towards the same post-industrial landscape. In Cadgwith I could – if I had the DNA in my ancestry – look at the sea and say “that’s my place, that’s where I belong” . But I can’t do that, or at least only if we walk a couple of miles along the coast to the old Serpentine works where I can happily turn my back to the sea and explore the ruined walls – poking, peering, turning things over in my hand like the found treasures of childhood. Even on the Lleyn peninsula we found ourselves drawn to a place which turned out to be the biggest manganese mine of its day – complete with headworks and winches rusting artfully in the sun.

This is something you can’t fake. A few years ago the Council specified some “wildflower” planting to brighten up a bit of fallow land awaiting development on the riverside. In year one, there was a magnificent and colourful display of flowers that didn’t really belong there at all. Dare I say it was rather lovely to see Cornflowers in the centre of Bath? but nature had other ideas and by the next year the local thugs had taken over again and they just loved the rich soil growing tall and fat. Then the following year there appeared a couple of plants of Weld – widely used for making dyes in the past. To return to the book I’ve been reading, it suddenly came to me that possibly – just possibly – this was a local species returned to its old haunts. I’d be amazed, but very pleasantly amazed if those seeds had – like the devil in the temptations – hidden in the ground until an opportune moment came for a return. The disturbance of the riverside soil near the site of an old dyeworks was just such an opportunity and up they came for a season and flowered – so maybe we’ll see them again, unless some beady-eyed council official deems them to be weeds and therefore not to be tolerated in a wildflower garden. It’s just another reason why urban plants feel like my dispersed cousins; their history is just as much my history. Hunting for them is like a free subscription to an ancestry website, and – as the children used to roar after an assembly at Redcliffe Primary School “Aaaaarrrmen!!!” to that.

Of the plant photos above, only one was taken in the original evolutionary place of the subject, two others feature ruins of long-gone industries , and just one of them embodies both; yet they all caught my eye – if only for their melancholic beauty. So clockwise from top left is a recently arrived alien called Wireplant (Muhlenbeckia complexa) which is an overseas plant that’s set up home in the extreme South West, in this case on the ruined chimney of an abandoned serpentine works. Next to it are some fine South African lilies called Zantedeschia aethiopia in a Cornish stream; a hybrid geranium called Geranium x oxonianum ssp Lace Time; another South African invasive invader called (rather unwokeishly) Kaffir fig; the flower of a bird-cherry and an abandoned water mill. Only the Bird Cherry is in exactly the place it started out, whilst the rest are either aliens or ruins. Notwithstanding the valiant efforts of the National Trust it seems that in the real world, the one in which kicking a stone is thought to hurt your toe; permanence, stability and reliability are in very short supply. And finally, ‘though far from exhaustively, here’s a proper villain, up there with Himalayan balsam and drug dealers; the very beautiful Giant Rhubarb AKA Gunnera tinctoria, the mere thought of which could land you up being deported to Rwanda. The only possible conclusion is that the natural world is incorrigibly promiscuous, creative, inventive and given to long holidays in distant places.

Madame and I have been grounded for weeks by the absence of the campervan, whose engine blew up after a disastrous service and a defective (brand new) water pump. If you know anything about car engines, the mention of a broken cambelt; (timing belt – if you’d rather), will strike fear into your heart; and so these thoughts about the nature of nature were on ice for a while – rather like Madame’s replacement knee joint which was also the subject of a much more successful service replacement six weeks ago. Both challenges are slowly resolving after six weeks of painkilling drugs for Madame and awkward conversations with the garage owner which were all mine! We managed at last to get away to the Bannau brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) for a couple of days in glorious sunshine where – aside from several other new warning lights and faults in the campervan – we were able to go for short walks up the Monmouth and Brecon canal.

Finally, on Tuesday, I sat for an hour and a half sharing the garage office with a bored receptionist struggling with the accounts and a television loudly running an endless loop of musical anthems from the 70’s and 80’s on a screen that was so low resolution you could barely read the titles. Meanwhile the boss was continually on the phone, hustling here and there and greeting his dodgy mates, one of whom was wearing a red MAGA cap, as they trailed through the door . By the look of them, irony would have been way above their pay-grade. Eventually they handed back the campervan keys and I thanked them with a forked tongue, glad to escape with my life and credit card intact.

Nothing is what it seems, the philosopher said; talking as usual – out of his head.

I’ve searched for the source of this quotation but it seems likely that its source is my old French teacher, Whacker Allan, who had spent time in France during/after the war and might have picked up some robust continental philosophy while he was there. Even as a teenager I realized that there was more to his witty poem than met the eye. Anyway, I forgive him for wielding his cane on me, back in the day, and I hope he forgave me for creeping into his room one lunchtime and smashing the cane into pieces.

So why this odd little quotation? Well it perfectly expresses the way things feel at the moment to many of us. I even discovered today that it has a name – “Hypernormalisation”– which describes a concept articulated first in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak – and I’m quoting from today’s Guardian newspaper – to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia ……… in a society where people are living with dissociation caused when institutions are broken; there is no effective leadership and systematic dysfunction creates fear, dread and denial. Most particularly because we somehow manage to struggle on, as if nothing has changed. Yep – I think that about sums it up!

Or to put it in in more familiar language, everything’s going to shit and it seems there’s nothing we can do about it. Even as I write this, the suspicion the Keir Starmer or one of his goons will read this, lick their indelible pencil and mark my name in a notebook for expulsion from the Party, flutters past my mind – but just to save time, it’s too late Pal – we both resigned when your addiction to betraying promises became apparent.

So we’re left with the unappetising fear that nature is not, if it ever was, natural– so to speak – in the sense that, like the sunrise and the seasons it never changes. To glimpse nature is to glimpse eternity they say, except it isn’t. Nature is more like a sixth form prom party; there are rules but we feel free to ignore them when we care to. While nature endlessly reinvents herself to respond to constant change; we, at the summit of creation stumble around as if we’ve lost the keys. We cling to the synthetic memory of the endless summers of the past without troubling ourselves with the science that tells us that shit happens, it really does.

Talking and thinking about nature is being overtaken by a kind of wistful sentimentality directed towards the past, as if by emulating it we might return to it. However if I dare be a bit controversial; when I visit National Trust Dyrham Park for example I don’t for the tiniest moment wish myself into a silk waistcoat because I know that all the evidence points to the inevitable truth that I’d be somewhere down in the latrines shovelling out the brown stuff. The earth is a mind bogglingly complex and inter-related system. Nothing, for instance, in the concept of Gaia suggests simplicity – as if reintroducing the Lynx in Scotland could return the earth to a previous setting. It may well be that re-introducing the Lynx will have a desirable positive impact on, for instance, deer numbers but it won’t do anything for the Dartmoor Atlantic Rain Forest.

So my argument is that if we are going successfully to manage the triple but related crises of climate change, financial collapse and species extinction then we must stop looking backwards. The reason we can’t sing our songs by the rivers of Babylon is because we’re not in Babylon (which no longer exists except as a pile of ruins and some rather exciting artifacts and stories; we no longer have the words to the songs and the rich natural history such as we still have would be unrecognizable to the Babylonians. The past, with its customs habits and regulations has utterly failed us and any proposed solution – (I’m looking at you MAGA hat!) – any proposed solution that looks just like the past without the problems is a palpable fraud. The future will be, must be different.

I’ve just written about the extraordinary adaptability of nature but we also have its sheer, unnecessarily and promiscuous beauty to lean on and more importantly to learn from. Nature is able to adapt so quickly because it’s local. The question “what’s happening to the earth” is so general as to be impossible to answer without another generalization. “What’s happening here?” is the better question and, capable of being interrogated, quantified and scaled up in many cases. Outside our front door the River Avon runs past stinking of detergent and human sewage; occasionally flooding with terrifying speed. We can walk the length of the problem, test the water and measure its flow, its inputs and the likely causes of any problems and then solve them. I don’t regard lack of will, lack of finance or lack of organisational capacity as excuses for doing nothing. In my imagined new world, truth and beauty walk hand in hand. Too much so-called political wisdom is based on doing nothing because anything else is too hard. Tree hugging nonsense I hear above the roar of the traffic but I don’t talk to the trees, they talk to me! they talk to us all! Far from being the summit and perfection of creation the human race feels more like a friday afternoon shift on the neoliberal production line. Why can’t we sing our songs? Because we are wasted in every sense of the word.

Yesterday, after six weeks, we finally got the campervan back from the garage. We’d already cancelled the first trip to Wales because just as we were about to leave we discovered that the alternator had failed; and so we cancelled the trip and took the van to the garage on November 4th to get it replaced. There were no more opportunities to get away before winter set in, and so we arranged to have the van serviced in March and to have the cambelt replaced at the same time. I’ve written about this already, but to recap briefly – on the second attempt at crossing the M48 bridge to Wales, the engine failed after 8 miles and we were towed ignominiously back to the garage a couple of days later. It turned out that the brand new water pump had failed, causing a domino style collapse of the new cambelt and pretty well blowing the engine up altogether. Fortunately the garage accepted responsibility and shouldered the bill of several thousand pounds under their warranty. Yesterday after two engine replacements, new valves, fuel injectors, water pump and camshaft we picked the van up and drove cautiously back to the storage site. The van has become – in psychoanalytic terms – a transitional object – a term invented by DW Winnicott to explain the importance that children attach to soft toys, teddy bears and comfort blankets and, evidently, adults attach to campervans. Anyway, next week we’ll make our third attempt to cross the River Severn and go back to the Bannau Brycheiniog for a bit of R&R after Madame’s knee replacement 3 weeks ago.

Walking back to the flat afterwards I spotted a type of grass that I’ve never photographed despite knowing it since I was a child. False Oat-grass pretty much describes itself. I do have a picture of its first cousin known as “bulbosa” which rather like yesterday’s plant was growing right outside the van; not six feet from the door and prefers a seaside setting. The only difference between the two variations is the underground part. The great thing about them both is that it’s so easy to strip the seeds between your thumb and finger. It’s a very sensuous feeling. You can occasionally bend the lower part of the stalk (culm) across the upper part and make a rather feeble gun which, in a following wind, might spray the seeds a couple of feet. Its other use is to place one of the broader leaves between your two thumbs and make a kind of wheezy reed which makes a gratingly horrible noise which annoys grown-ups. This is a great example of ethnobotany which studies the uses to which plants are put in different cultures. Children learn these uses from an early age as long as their parents let them outside the door to learn the dangerously wild skills of being annoying. The best guns, for instance are made with ribwort plantain which on a good day might be fired a yard or so. The broader leaf of Plantago major can be teased apart to make a little harp. I could also mention daisy chains but they were a closely guarded girl-skill and we weren’t allowed to play. Other more annoying games could be played with Cleavers, and burdocks. At a higher level of aggression there were also stingers (nettles) with dock leaves as the preferred antidote although I’ve since learned that plantain leaves would have been a bit better.

If, during these games, we got hungry, in spring we could always chew a few fresh hawthorn leaves (bread and cheese). In the late summer we could find an old tin can and some puddle water and boil up elderberries for wine. Then there was our variation on pooh sticks which involved skewering hard dog turds on sticks and chasing one another around with them. We could make perfume from rose petals and cider from scrumped apples. Obviously conkers were played in the autumn and we could take a break and smoke bits of old mans’ beard like very thin cigarettes. Dandelions could be gathered for feeding the rabbits which, if we were lucky would sometimes disappear and re-emerge on a plate as stew. The upshot of all this unstructured ethnobotany was that we set out in life knowing large numbers of plants and what you could do with them even if you didn’t quite know their names. I’m afraid that’s no longer the case and is probably one of the reasons our culture is so painfully and dangerously divided from nature.

A couple of days ago I wrote a piece suggesting ways we could encourage a new generation of naturalists and fire them up to fight for the earth. This time I’m suggesting that the starting point needs to be in childhood. My greatest fear is that we’re doing them far more harm allowing them unlimited access to social media than we would by risking letting them out unsupervised to experience the uncurated wild.