Category: Uncategorized

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.

That’s very unfair to the plantlife of Bath – after all I’ve recorded 32 flowering plants so far – but at home you sometimes have to search hard at this time of the year; the needles are all in their haystacks. I’m not quite sure where it happened, but one minute Madame was noticing that the trees on the side of the motorway were barely in leaf and then, somewhere beyond Dartmoor and Bodmin moor the roadside was white with Blackthorn flowers. A kind of bliss settled over us as we left the boredom of the A30 and drilled down through the alphabet past Truro until we reached Helston, took the Lizard road and the narrow lanes where even passing a lone bicycle takes an age. The final stretch of the journey was what we come here for every year. Botanising and driving even a small car at the same time is a dangerous occupation – as Madame pointed out whilst I did an alarming bit of careening at ten miles an hour past the bridal lace of flowers on the verge.

Where else but here would you see Alexanders, Cow Parsley, Hogweed and Three-cornered garlic jostling with each under a snowfall of Blackthorn like brushed up sixth formers in a school prom? I slowed down to a crawl, opened the window and breathed in the air. Back again like a bad penny with sixty years of memories to share with Madame after we first came here to see the Art School and our first glimpse of the real sea after the brown waters of the Bristol Channel; and the first Dracaenas which we thought were palm trees; and we were on fire – apart from the fact that the landlady at the B&B refused to believe we were married (we were absurdly young) and put us into separate rooms. Bloody Methodists!

And so we’re here again with my pile of books and these days a laptop and mobile router and more unnecessary kit than you could shake a stick at. Slept like a log (do logs actually sleep, I wonder?) and we’re booked in at the pub for a Mothering Sunday lunch. Walking is going to be a bit limited this time but Madame is having a knee replacement in a couple of weeks and she’ll soon be skipping like a young Gazelle. The sun is shining and looks set to carry on doing its spring thing – so what’s not to like?

If I were an influencer, which – thank goodness I’m not, because it’s almost impossible to remember an occasion when I’ve ever influenced anyone – I might try to persuade you to buy an imaginary lifestyle aid from this imaginary pub in the countryside. Could one of my zircon encrusted (thanks Mr Zappa) podgers change your life?

This modestly brilliant idea came to me shortly after I typed the last few bits of data into the database of my plant finds which I started on August 21st last year and finished two days ago. It was always a pretty hubristic venture: to attempt to gather together all my random photos, notebooks and printed lists from the last fifteen years into one unified searchable database. It has been a huge deal; soaking up many hours and days checking and verifying all those years of misidentifications, absent locations and mystery plants in six thousand data chunks.

The idea of the lifestyle podger came into my head when I was trying to think of a way of harmonising all the things I (we) get up to. To name three, for instance, there’s botanising (looking for plants), allotmenteering and writing; any one of which could soak up every bit of energy I possess. An image from the past popped into my head which I thought might serve as a metaphor for juggling with half a dozen balls.

One of my first jobs was as a labourer in a steel erecting firm where I’d got in by lying about my ability to arc weld. I could write for days about that factory; the noise, the smells and the language – but I remembered a tool which I’m sure we called a bodger but which a bit of research reveals as a podger. So intense was the noise from the machinery we were using I was probably mishearing the ‘p’ for a ‘b’. My deafness and tinnitus now are in all likelihood the result of sawing up RSJ’s with a huge hydraulic saw and no ear protection. Anyway, when you reached the stage of putting the steel up with all its bolt holes correctly drilled you had to align the pieces which were heavy and difficult to manoeuvre into place, especially at height. The podger – a tool with a bent spike at one end and a spanner at the other – was how you did it. If you could get the podger through he corresponding holes in two lengths of rolled steel joist you could put the first and then a second bolt into place to align the pieces and then bolt them together securely.

My idea was to represent the airborne ballet of swinging lengths of heavy joist as we joined them together and made a structure from all the random pieces – as a metaphor for the way you might try to form all of the demanding activities of a life into a structure that makes some kind of sense. All I would need would be a form of invisible podger – and the nerve to believe that any kind of organisation is better than chaotically staggering from one demand to the next like someone with a huge credit card debt and just a few tenners to hold the bailiffs at bay.

And so – the Potwell Inn zircon encrusted lifestyle podger – on sale today at the heavily discounted price of tuppence – before the hostile reviews put me out of business!

I thought I’d be more pleased than I was when I finished bringing the database up to date. Seven months of work and I’d turned a heap of reminiscences into something sensational and powerfully useful, and yet the price had been to neglect writing on the blog – which slowed to a crawl, and to leave the allotment to its own devices for the whole of that time. When the unstoppable tide of spring started up a few weeks ago I was feeling completely demoralized; and months of sitting in front of a computer screen had wasted any physical strength and resilience I might have built up last season.

So it was time to wield the podger and align the elements in time for sowing, planting, writing and botanising while we waited for the campervan to be repaired after a botched cam-belt replacement had left us stranded on the motorway for hours. Words were exchanged with the garage owner who only slowly acknowledged his responsibility and offered to do all the repairs under warranty. The latest report on the blogging showed that the number of loyal readers (thank you all) is slowly increasing. Meanwhile we spent the time (planned for two missed adventures) on the allotment and the new season (at last) looks do- able. I suppose a time will come when our bodies will refuse to rise to the occasion but – it seems – not this year, praise be! Next year – with new knees installed, Madame will be dancing the tango once more.

A couple of days ago we were in a garden centre buying some new raspberry canes and a Malus for the container garden outside the flat when I ended up having a flirty conversation with a couple of women at the till. Madame thoughtfully stepped back and allowed me my moment in the sun; then later asked me if I was planning on bringing one of them home. Even the faintest miasma of possibility was further than I could stretch – and in any case we’re soon off to Cornwall for our first adventure of the season. I haven’t managed to bolt the bits of my life together yet, but my default melancholic disposition has slunk into the background.

Oh and a couple of discoveries that I made over the past seven months-

Last night we streamed parts one and two of Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Bob Dylan – “No Direction Home”, and like so many veterans of our generation it triggered some complicated memories leading inexorably into that conversation about life changing moments. There’s never anything complicated or even related about these moments. For me, with “Hard Rain” – the song he was singing the first time I heard him – I was standing at the window of a house in Hartcliffe in a party where me and my best friend Eddy turned out to be the only guests of two girls we fancied. We were high up on a hill and I remember looking out across Bristol and knowing that after hearing Dylan nothing would ever be the same again. Notwithstanding our best efforts the night remained completely chaste and we all kept our jeans on, four in a bed. A couple of years later Madame and I found each other and the second great tsunami of our teenage years overwhelmed us.

Watching the film, many years later, I was completely captivated once more by Dylan’s capacity to own the song; to inhabit it (and I wasn’t one of those who hated his electrification). There was always that complete correspondence between the sung words and the experiences behind it, even when those experiences were not personal, but grown in the fibre of overlapping lives. That night I couldn’t sleep I was restless and troubled by another memory.

My route into Christianity (and out of it again!) was long, convoluted and often painful. I finally decided to throw my hat into the ring because living it out was the only way I could imagine ever finding out what it was about. (Madame finally said to me – “You’re not going to be a bloody vicar are you?”). Thirty years later I was increasingly dismayed by what so-called organized religion really stood for, and it’s a subject I don’t feel much need to enlarge on. However, concealed in the warp and weft of everyday unreflective religion are some practices of enormous heft and significance and singing was one of them.

There’s a song called the exultet (sometimes exsultet) which tradition demands is sung by the Deacon (a priest near the end of training in the Church of England). It’s a prolonged unaccompanied plainsong explosion of joy from some time between the fifth and the seventh centuries, and you really need to be taught it because the archaic notation passed out of common use centuries ago. So it fell to me to sing the exultet in the church to which I was sent on the first Easter eve after I arrived and I sang it for 25 years in the parish I took over; the last time being 10 years ago. The first time I sang it I’d been overworking (we all did) in the lead-up to Easter and on Good Friday morning I got out of the bath and slipped head first through the plate glass window of the bathroom. There was a great deal of blood, Our oldest child solemnly pronounced that I’d severed an artery and I would be dead within minutes; our next door neighbour came to help but after one glimpse of me naked and covered in blood she fainted. In the end I was saved by our other neighbour who, being a midwife, was used to that sort of thing and bound me up in towels and got me off to A&E. A waggish nurse asked if I wasn’t overdoing Good Friday, turning up there with wounds in my hands and feet and a huge sliver of glass in my side. Ha Ha I thought and then asked politely if it was OK to pass out. The next day was Easter Eve and I just had to sing the exultet. Some lovely gentle men came and cleared up the mess as I sat in the garden and contemplated my stitches. On Easter eve I swallowed a large glass of brandy on the advice of the choirmaster and organist and sang as if my life depended on it. Maybe it did.

The Easter vigil happens every year on the evening before Easter Day. It’s a long service of readings and psalms at the end of which all the lights are turned out and the first light of the new Christian year is brought into the church with great ceremony, prayers and responses. The big Paschal candle is lit and everyone in the congregation gets their small candle lit from the large one. When it reaches the stand where it normally lives, the exultet is sung into the candlelit darkness and silence. It’s an overwhelming experience to sing it – so overwhelming in fact that every year I had to lock myself in the church and sing it over and over again until I could stop myself crying as I sang. And here’s the link back to Bob Dylan. I was always possessed by the song. I never quite knew whether I was singing the song or the song was singing me. Thirteen hundred years of tradition, embracing billions of people and thousands of cultures I would never encounter, all seemed to be joining in the great song with me. I have never missed anything in my life as much as I miss singing the exultet.

When I retired from institutional responsibilities I also stopped singing; I stopped music altogether because I couldn’t bear it any more. George Bernard Shaw called it the brandy of the damned. I must be the world’s greatest sinner.

This is one of my favourite views of the allotment, looking west across the row of cordon fruit trees we planted five years ago. There’s a Victoria plum, a Bramley apple, a damson, a Conference pear and just out of frame a prolific apple that we’ve never identified. On the far side of the polytunnel are a dozen soft-fruit bushes and a further five apple varieties; oh and the lovely Tayberry growing alongside the tunnel. Perennials are such a gift. There are three rhubarb varieties next to the Tayberry; a Fulton’s Strawberry Surprise, A Timperley Early and a Victoria which all together keep us in fruit from early summer to late autumn. As you’ll see from the photograph, the paths have all been topped up with wood chips, and the raised beds with compost and leafmould. After a dire season last year and an arduously long winter we took the opportunity of a few days of sunshine to regain some kind of control – which led me into a chain of thought that led from our small plot of land to international economics.

It’s the word “control” that stopped me in my tracks. Understanding how dependent we are upon the weather and how vulnerable to all kinds of natural hazards and pests it would be all too easy to see nature as an opponent; a force that demands fierce and relentless vigilance – and so the temptation to resort to chemicals and traps to tilt the balance of power in our favour – and yes: faced with an outbreak of bindweed as we were last season; or asparagus beetle as we were for years, it would be easy to cave in and reach for the bottle. In fact we gave up and dug out the Asparagus bed which had never been productive; and took down the protective mesh surrounding the fruit cage, which the bindweed had treated like a climbing frame. Real gardening is like writing/genius (as described either by Mark Twain or Thomas Edison) – “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”.

If we’ve learned anything at all about nature over the decades, it’s that good gardening (and running a country well) is an act of continuous and humble collaboration. Plants either like where you put them and how you tend them or they don’t – and if they’re not happy they display all sorts of aberrant behaviour or (and then) they die. Growing a garden is a conversation between us and our plants; it’s a contemplative occupation punctuated as it was this week by muscle busting activity after a long winter layoff. Just now; with all the beds prepped and ready and the tunnel filled with its first temporary seasonal residents – there’s a brief lull before the good storm begins.

Coffee table gardening is full of sunny days and idle afternoons strolling between the roses and sipping champagne. Real gardening features a self-extending list of jobs that may or may not get done this season or indeed ever! Such strolling as time permits is fully occupied with a conversation which could land you in trouble with your neighbours if they could hear you talking to your plants. The reward is found in the kitchen while the failures land up in the compost bin along with all your regrets and wasted opportunities. Change takes time and experience is gained very slowly, but the payback is a kind of loving tolerance. The slug, the snail and the Cabbage White butterfly are as surely our neighbours as the veg we grow and they are likely doing things that benefit us, even as we curse them under our breath. Once we resort to threats and violence we have lost our standing with nature and like Cain in the Bible we will be reduced to wandering half starved in a desert of our own making and with no neighbours to give us shelter.

Of course, being human, I’m always tempted by the idea of control – and as I was mulling over this post another question dropped into my mind. Is my endless list making a part of my being that wants to get a grip on a world that can seem chaotic? As my database grows and my knowledge of wild plants extends, I feel a kind of peace as I tick off each find – “well at least I’ve got that one where I want it; sorted, ordered, fixed”. And why do I write this journal? perhaps because many days pass when I’m so battered by randomness I need to write to make some kind of sense of it. My days are not sufficiently measured by traditions, customs and calendars which really represent our human need for times and seasons. What’s so cruel about climate change is not so much increased morbidity as much as the general feeling of being lost in the no longer predictable. For a gardener, climate destruction is personal. The inner and the outer worlds; the macro and the micro are not different things but the same thing seen through different perspectives. The deranged madness of politicians and capitalists could easily become my own symptoms of madness and violence like a pitbull released from its lead and out of control. Be careful what you wish for: wealth and power are the crystal meth of international politics.

I used to think a lot about my literary heroes and role models. Years ago I realized that they are all outsiders in some sense; many of them created by Charles Dickens. I wanted to be Ham Peggotty, never David Copperfield and yet – many decades later – the character that feels most like me is Mr Dick – (stop that sniggering in the back row!) the gentle neurodiverse protegé of Betsy Trotwood who struggled through writing to make sense of his life, tormented by what she (anticipating Freud) called transference; haunted by his incarceration in an asylum and that of his sister too, and by the execution of KIng Charles the First.

Anyway, that’s enough miserable maundering from me. There was a real moment of inspiration midweek when I was logging some old photos and came across a plant I’d spent hours looking for one hot day in mid Wales near the Dolaucothi gold mine. I knew it was likely to be there but couldn’t find it. Amazingly I discovered this week that I’d already seen it in 2016 at Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire where – thinking it was oddly beautiful I took some snapshots and never properly identified them as Sanicle, Sanicula europaea. I sometimes wonder if I should waste less time cataloguing and get out there in the wilds. This week I was given the answer – it’s 10% taking the photo and 90% figuring out what it is!

Actually this photo of a Lenten Rose taken in Royal Victoria park – as you’ll see from the timestamp – was taken on January 15th. There are a few others taken more recently, not least the daffodils in the window boxes, but we’ve been horribly conspired against by the weather but also another project that’s grown and grown. A splendid example of mission creep!

I mentioned several posts ago that I’m building a searchable database, pulling together the botanical parts of over 10,000 largely undocumented photos that I’ve taken over the years. Mission creep was inevitable once I’d discovered the incredible power of modern software to sort, list and interrogate thousands of data points in a few seconds. My original plan was to list all the plants I’d photographed and properly identified; hoping to reach 100 species. That number was soon exceeded and I realized that I was seeing the same plants more than once, so should I record every one or just the first time? My distressingly ill-ordered collection of random pictures was mostly filled with plants that took my eye for some reason. Consequently it’s very light on the ordinary everyday plants like Broad-leaved dock which I’d known since childhood for its capacity to cool nettle stings. But I’d actually never bothered to photograph either the nettles or the dock leaves which left a large hole in my database. This, and a problem with the EXIF data which recorded dates in an American format led to a thoroughly dodgy list when first sorted by date, and the incorrect dates which were added in bulk – had to be found and altered one at a time!

What’s an unrecorded photo called? -well completely lost is the best answer. When most professionals make a mistake, they solemnly intone the phrase “lessons will be learned” and take a quick look to make sure their pensions are still secure. When we amateurs mess up we have to start over and repair the damage with no pensions to lose. We even have to beat ourselves up for our own stupidity. It’s a tough call.

However in my case lessons really have been learned because every photo has to be checked and double checked for ID, date and location. I’ve discovered that phone grid references can be a bit wonky – some of my finds have been a mile out to sea. That too is occasionally my own fault for failing to type the correct numbers in, so now I use a suite of six separate programmes to check that I’ve got it all right. Then there’s the thorny issue of sorting the garden escapes from the ghost orchids and that means looking at the mighty databases run by the BSBI and several others to check that the plant in question grows where I’m recording it. The Book of Stace always has the last word on whether I should record or remain silent. Occasionally I find something that’s really original and there follows arm wrestling with the gate-keepers to get my record accepted. Peaceful?? you’re kidding!

Luckily I’ve got an excellent memory and so in front of me now is a database entry no 417 for Pencilled Cranesbill, Geranium versicolour. I can tell you exactly where I saw that plant because its beauty took my breath away.

So that’s all taken up hideous amounts of time and affected my postings severely. Then we’ve both had abundant hospital appointments trying to get our various ailments under control to free up the summer for fun stuff. The campervan has had an even worse year than us and we’ve had to spend a great deal on getting it back on the road. All this culminated a major service, new cam belt, new alternator and brake renewal. Our first trip away was supposed to be this weekend to celebrate the beginning of spring in the Bannau Brycheiniog – Brecon Beacons in old money; but the fates had other plans and we got less than five miles down the motorway when the speedo and then engine failed completely. Reversing downhill without power, brakes or steering back to the hard shoulder with cars and lorries passing at 70+mph was a bit hairy but we made it without causing any major problems – with the help of a friendly lorry driver and spent six hours waiting for help to arrive – during which we were clearly being seen as elderly and vulnerable because we were visited by every patrol car and traffic officer in South Wales, and phoned every half hour to make sure we were OK, Someone even offered us some space blankets! Eventually and in the dark, a recovery vehicle turned up and loaded us up for a very short journey back to where we’d set of in the springtime of our youth. We went to bed with a sandwich and slept fitfully as I planned the next stage of recovery getting the van back to the guilty garage. As the AA man said – he didn’t believe in coincidences either. Needless to say the garage took a more cautious view suggesting that the engine failure might not be anything to do with them. Harrumph says I!

Oh and just to redeem the shining hour I photographed a dock leaf today