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-
Always identify a plant on the day you found it and while you can still see it and look at the bits you’ll wish (ten years on) that you’d paid more attention to.
Don’t trust a mobile phone grid reference – they’ll sometimes leave you literally at sea. Those glorious lat and long numbers on the exif data will convert into a completely inaccurate National Grid reference that might have some poor soul in the future searching on the wrong side of the river.
Don’t disdain the very ordinary common plants. They lead fascinating lives notwithstanding their roguish reputation as weeds.
Notice everything. I’ve been seeing but not looking at the mistletoe plant above for ten years and never paid any attention to it. No idea why it suddenly popped into my mind.
The view up the Percuil river in Cornwall; March 2022. A place of peace.
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
Well, it’s been a fairly hellish winter and an effort of will to keep going but – finally – the Celandines are out; Imbolc festival has come and gone, along with wassailing – without many people noticing – and extensive counselling sessions have taken place to repair the emotional damage of the Christmas season when high expectations collide at speed with human nature. Time, then, for mending the nets which in my case has occupied many hours on the computer, preparing (and repairing) my little homebrewed wildflower database. I only thought yesterday how difficult it is to turn random and uncatalogued – let alone identified – photographs …….. to turn them and their associated EXIF information into proper data. Data that I can sort, filter, number and export to whom it may concern. It’s like a random collection of holiday snaps being transformed by the power of AI into a magnificent library. But we’re not there yet! AI isn’t half as clever as it pretends, and every single decision has to be interrogated and challenged, so my desk still groans under the weight of all those field guides and there are many sheets of scribbled-on paper surrounding me. I’ve made major and exciting discoveries about taking photos of plants but I can only wish that I’d known all this years ago. Today I’ve been “doing” violets; last week it was Fleabanes and I’m not even thinking about Dandelions; ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof!‘
Throw all that into the mix with our long battle with the landlord concerning black mould in our concrete mock-Georgian block; two visits from surveyors hoping to prove that nothing can be done unless we open all the windows in the freezing weather and take it in turns to breathe (obviously it’s all our own fault) and by the end of the week Madame had built a temporary electric bender over the sofa and refused to engage for forty eight hours.
We managed to work in a couple of lectures, mind you. At the first talk the expert on Harvest Mice had obviously started hibernating in the cold and failed to turn up so the ever prepared secretary (who’s also the Vice County Botanical recorder) sorted through her bag and dug up a fascinating lecture previously delivered to the Somerset Rare Plants Group and which inspired me to even greater curatorial heights because we’d actually found about 20% of the plants already.
The second talk was given by the friend of a friend; an artist and teacher who’d worked with our oldest friend and also with some of the young people I’d worked with as well back in the day, not to mention his workshops at WOMAD. Our oldest friend Tony Eastman was given a wonderful welcome and tribute was paid to his still undervalued work. He deserved no less! Tony followed a similar course to me. My Dad wanted me to be an engineer and Tony was sent to the shipyard in Plymouth to do an apprenticeship. He applied to go to Art School as soon as he finished the apprenticeship, and I landed up working for a while in engineering before I swerved off towards real life. With Tony and Glen coming for tea before the lecture I baked some scones and bought clotted cream to go with home made bramble jelly – after all he’s a Devonian – and we gorged on home-made scones and jam before catching the bus down to the Art School. During the scoff he made the intriguing remark that in his childhood they used to eat the scones and clotted cream with black treacle and call it “Thunder and Lightning”. I could hardly wait to try it and so our youngest – who’s a chef – came and tasted them with me the following day. They were fabulous – if life threateningly sweet and fat!
Saw a quote yesterday (I think Wendell Berry) which said that the point where you simply don’t know what to do or where to go is the moment where your real life begins. Like most social media posts I can’t find it now, or verify it because it’s sunk under the dead weight of a million more recent postings. I often wonder why we pay so much attention to the zombie-sphere but then, now and again, something important comes up and yesterday’s crystallized something important for me.
Just recently I’ve almost given up listening to the news or scrolling through it on my phone because it makes me unhappy with no prospect of a remedy at hand. Once the morons have taken over there’s nothing left to do but savour the good bits of life and bin the rest.
And last night when we went to bed I was filled with an unexpected kind of happiness. I’ve always been a rather driven kind of person, but over the past few weeks I could sense that something had changed. I no longer have any big projects on my mind. The Potwell Inn blog is ticking over very slowly and my once burning desire to reach a million words has faded without any disappointment or personal sense of failure; if I get there that’s OK and if not – well that’s OK too. Earlier this week I stepped aside from the Littleton Wassail which has been a very special part of my life for many years but all things come to an end, and last year – after nearly falling off a slippery picnic table while I was blessing the orchard – I realized that I was surrounded by people who really didn’t know that I was once, ten years ago, the Vicar. It wasn’t a sad feeling, but simply a realization that with the passage of time everything changes.
It’s been a rather frantic time anyway, with the hot water in the flat breaking down for three weeks, and the campervan needing some major and expensive repairs; new cam belt and alternator, brake pads, and the full service that’s long overdue. We drove back from the garage in the snow – which was lovely. How much longer can we keep going? But then, Christmas is coming and this week I decided to make a Christmas cake and some Christmas puddings. This is one of my most treasured cooking tasks in the year and it involves a great deal of assembling ingredients, beating, mixing, soaking, steaming and considerable amounts of alcohol (not for me, but the cakes and puds). Sometimes cooking can throw a line into the past. I can’t make the puddings without remembering my mother sweating over the old copper washing boiler as the puddings cooked. Yesterday I steamed them in a rather smaller preserving pan for eight hours. When we moved here I chucked out the two old aluminium hi-dome pressure cookers because they didn’t work on an induction hob. However the new one will only cook one pudding at a time so I opted for the old way; topping up the water through the day as my mum would have done – I remember her lifting the cloth bound puds out with her ancient bleached copper stick, engulfed in steam. The cake, after almost five hours in the oven, was rich dark and moist and I’ll be anointing it with even more brandy over the next few weeks.
Christmas brings out the best and the worst in us. The TV ads sell the usual lies about happy families and perfect days, and we all end up buying into the Panglossian thought that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while solicitors and therapists clear their diaries for the tsunami of disappointment that comes in January. But Christmas puds and cakes are a kind of token against that eventuality. We can still, at least try to make the world a better, more generous place.
The picture at the top shows me abandoning the wooden spoon and mixing the puddings with my bare hands. There’s no better feeling in the world and the old tradition of making a wish comes with each sensual sweep of the hands. My head is somewhere else, thinking of Christmases past, and meanwhile – for no particular reason – I was slow cooking boeuf bourguignon in the oven. Later in the afternoon I took Madame to the hospital physiotherapy unit and they told her to expect a date for her second knee replacement in the next three weeks. These were so many ordinary, everyday challenges in one day and yet they glowed with their mundane goodness. Van mended; cakes and puddings made; favourite meal cooked, wonky knee replacement in view. The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but the ordinary blesses everything it touches if we dare to allow it.
This year’s solstice will be a very significant turning point for the Potwell Inn, Heading for spring with renewed vigour and everything fixed I suppose we’ll have the dubious pleasure of watching the so-called great powers implode and collapse under the weight of their contradictions. If we let them we are imprisoned by the media, especially the social media, in enforcing universal despair and the sense of powerlessness. A silicone implanted world of lies and mirrors can trap us in passivity. On the other hand the Potwell Inn team is just off for a chilly walk in the sunshine.
Yesterday after an abortive attempt in the week when we found it closed, we finally made it to the Museum of Bath at Work – Bath’s own industrial museum; tucked away in what was once a Real Tennis court in the eighteenth century and is now filled with the perfect complement to Roman remains and Jane Austin worship. Its biggest problem is that it’s rather difficult to find – just off Julian Road and behind Christ Church. Google maps will find it easily enough but if you fancy a visit check the website first because it’s only open at weekends at the moment and then closes entirely for a couple of winter months.
I’ve been keen on visiting for ages because it has a collection of artifacts which I had a very small walk-on part in recording more than fifty years ago when I was an art student in Bath and was lucky enough to become bag carrier for the day to a photographer called (from fading memory), Anne Hard or Hardy who had been commissioned to photograph the old Bowler’s workshops as an emergency record before the entire site was demolished to make way for the ugliest building in Bath -the old Avon Street car park which has mercifully been reduced to rubble. Adam Fergusson didn’t call his book about that era “The Sack of Bath” for nothing.
The utterly un-lamented Avon Street car park
Bowlers was a Bath institution, but the business went bust in the late 60’s and that day when we let ourselves into the building it looked as if the last of the Bowlers had simply walked away and closed the door on a company that had been in existence since 1872, and during which time not so much as a fizzy drinks label had been thrown away. There was a forge, abandoned we were told, when the blacksmith had died. It looked exactly as it had done as he clocked out the night before. I found this profoundly moving and the memory has remained with me ever since. I’m not a believer in ghosts, but I’m certainly a believer in ghostly presences where the past hangs around like a miasma. Sadly – or perhaps fortunately – the forge hadn’t made the move to the museum, but I’d have felt very vulnerable if I’d seen it once again (as long as it was still set up for the morning’s work). There, in the gloom and dust, was an abundance of old belt driven machinery, marble stoppered fizzy drinks bottles, hand tools and machines for which I felt a strange affinity.
But the machine that most stuck in my memory was a Griffin six-stroke gas engine; mainly, I think, because for whatever reason I’d never thought of gas as the motive power for what in every other respect looked like a steam engine. We photographed the Griffin and another steam engine and moved on to try to record the chaos.
So there in front of the gas engine which I hadn’t expected to see, because I thought it had gone to Bristol; there I met myself like the man in the poem who wasn’t there – wasn’t there as a student in his early twenties with no idea what the future would hold. While Madame wandered around the other exhibits I pondered the paradox of standing twice next to this remarkable engine on occasions separated by more than fifty years, and with a strong sense of ruptured continuity. The connection needed repair as if there was some sort of injury, but such an injury says much more about our sense of fragility than it does about forgetfulness.
The museum also has a section devoted to cabinet making and some exhibits from the Corsham Bath stone mines which we visited several times in the past. My grandfather was a carpenter and the recreated workshop brought back many memories of him. Here are some more photographs.
The old pilgrim footbridge at Espalion with the modern roadbridge immediately behind it.
Went to bed at 8.00pm last night after a meal of pre-packed tabbouleh (vile) and crisps. Food and drink for 24 hours cost 30€ at a local shop. Up at 6.30 and breakfasted on UHT milk and prune tart and set out at 8.15. Stiff climb through lovely woods and then at the crest of the climb we came to a shed with a communal wood fired baker’s oven where a local farmer had put flasks of coffee and biscuits out with a 1€ honesty box. Had 2 coffees and started to drop down the hill. Lunch and a snooze on a bench at St Come d’Olt (tin of tuna in tomato sauce) and then into different scenery along the River Lot. First rain today. Easy walk into Espalion + decent campsite and 2 ice cold colas when we got there.
Put tent up in rain but now it’s cleared up and we’re off in search of saucisson and aligôt at €6. 80.
Journal
As I write this we’re sheltering from left-over hurricane Lee in the campervan whilst waiting for Nigel to show up at the weekend. We’ve had to remove and store anything that could have been damaged by 80+Kph gusts so the interior of the van is a bit overcrowded with the kit that would normally be outside. There’s a bit of a last man standing feel about the campsite because of fifty or so vans at the weekend there are now just four; but we’re used to these storms by now and provided we remove or lash down any blow away bits like the WiFi aerial we know we’ve survived worse – including two totally wrecked tents! So here I am writing while Madame is drawing, all in companionable silence surrounded by a typically sodden Cornish landscape under a leaden sky.
I’m finding this whole exercise both fascinating and a bit daunting. Intellectually it’s like a jigsaw puzzle – maps, journal, exif data on photographs and memories all need to be fitted together for each section of the walk. The reward, however, is real because it seems to me that by writing this account of our Camino I’m understanding it for the first time as the fragmented pieces are brought together. I’m still waiting for the Damascus Road experience, but I’m old and experienced enough to know that those kinds of revelations usually end in tears – mostly other peoples! Why do we suffer the delusion that everything must be understood? Even from the inside, this account is still partial and riddled with contradictions and elisions – the stuff I didn’t, and still don’t want to write about.
This next part, though, I remember so well as a moment of joy.
27th May 2010
Had a lovely evening – found a restaurant run by an elderly couple. She was bent over with arthritis and his hips were gone so he could only shuffle along, but they seemed to alternate between waiting and cooking. Potage du Jour was wonderful – plain big chunky vegetable soup but he put the tureen on the table [when he saw how hungry we were] and we scoffed three bowls each. It was the best veg soup I’ve ever tasted. Then we had the saucisson and aligôt.
Journal
There was some kind of exposition (in the French sense) going on in the town – based on an eco/green theme, which was gathering quite a bit of attention. I’ll put some photographs below. I should also perhaps explain Aligot for anyone who might not have come across it. For a long distance walker (or a farm labourer) it’s the most perfect calorie rich food in the world. We’ve seen people queuing for 50 yards to get a paper plateful down in the South East of France. It’s basically mashed potato – and I don’t mean lumpy, I mean beaten into a smooth puree, with the addition of lots and lots of cheese and olive oil. The ultimate combination of carbs, protein and fat which also tastes wonderful – just don’t offer it to your teenage daughters! With the addition of a couple of those spindly but very meaty local sausages, we probably didn’t need to eat for a couple of days.
At this point, 100 miles in, we were almost exactly halfway to Cahors. Espalion is situated on the River Lot – and walking along rivers has one massive disadvantage. When you follow a main river you quickly discover that every tributary has gouged itself a valley – often in hilly country a steep sided valley. So while the unfolded map – minus contour lines – suggests a bosky ramble along the river bank, the reality is one stupendous climb after another – each followed by knee destroying descents. This is possibly my only useful advice on the conduct of the Camino.
Above – the remains of the dam and sluice at Froe Mill
The disarmingly named “Place” – perfect for Cressida and Tarquin’s wedding.
At breakfast today I caught sight of the label of the sliced loaf we’d bought in Truro – it read “Jacksons of Yorkshire – baker of champion bread”; so the full Yorkshire schtick, then. There was a long list of ingredients that lit the foodie lights like a pinball machine and included dried wheat sourdough and vinegar. All of the ingredients could be found, or produced locally – rather than trundling 389 miles by lorry from Hull.
So, unsurprisingly my mind soon drifted on to the subject of tidal mills because here on the Roseland peninsula are the remains of no less than three of them. They’re situated on three easily accessible creeks (one of them by a busy road so not one we’ve visited on foot) . All that remains of the mill at Froe are some heavily worked up cottages and the old retaining wall and sluice. There may be similar remains at Trethem which is now home to a large caravan site, and was in any case fed by a strong local stream and used an overshot wheel and of the others one, at Place, is still visible as the retaining wall of the lawn in front of Place House. The final tidal mill was at the head of Polingey Creek. All of them were functional in the Middle Ages. So my first point is simply that when we point to tidal power as a way forward in this energy hungry era, apart from the window – which is a technological latecomer and only works in the summer – the power of the tide to drive machinery has over 600 years of field testing in this country; probably much more. Think of it – the tides are utterly predictable; don’t suffer from droughts and being salt water driven don’t freeze up, although they might silt up in some places. The force of the tide is truly and strictly elemental and a potential source of awesome energy. Our problem is that we can’t accept that even if all the renewable energy sources reach maturity in the next decade we’re so addicted, we can’t contemplate using less of it.
Anyway, I cheerfully pick up my bread flour, milled from locally grown wheat less than 30 miles away in the same way that I’m content (not exactly happy) to pay over the odds to collect our local milk in a glass bottle from a machine in the market, when it’s working! We grow a proportion of our own vegetables on the allotment – so alone, we’re not self sufficient, but collectively we can make a difference to the earth, to the producers and for ourselves.
Enough, I know, we get the picture so let me add the clincher. Tidal mills on creeks are virtually silent apart from a bit of creaking and grinding – well they would be, wouldn’t they! The problem, as with so many areas of traditional craft skills, is that there are very few people around that could run such a mill. A skill that took centuries to develop can’t be taught on a City and Guilds short course. My old friend Dick England, now passed, learned to mill flour on the heavy machinery at Spillers in Avonmouth, before retreating up the Severn to Berkeley where he milled stone ground flour on a small scale, sang tenor like an angel and refused to mill new wheat berries until they’d matured a bit. As a business I suspect it was hard going, but as a culture it was a fine thing.
Of course I’m predisposed to love these remote and abandoned pre industrial and industrial ruins and traces. Anyone who’s read this blog for any time will know that I’m a sucker for an abandoned pithead or a slag heap – even one heavily polluted with lead and cadmium – because there are wonderful wild plants that risk everything to eke out a life on the bare stones. Of all the gifts of nature; resilience and adaptability strike me as being the key to our future.
But I blame Charles Dickens for my passion for open landscapes and muddy creeks. I can’t begin to describe what an impression Peggotty’s upturned boat/house on the beach at Great Yarmouth had on me as a child. I can see why David Copperfield – as he was being taken there for the first time – would remark that the landscape would be improved with a few hills, and I can see why – before long – he changed his mind. In a city everything is vertical, jagged, aggressive and overpowering. Estuaries, mud flats, creeks and seascapes are horizontal; they invite contemplation and ask you to take a break and sit down. The sound of the wind in trees is good in many ways, but the sound of the wind in grass and rushes and reeds is altogether more lovely. A low murmur in the background, barely perceptible, and then wind and waves dancing filigrees of sound above. The colours of the city and even of the inland counties can be bright and brassy, but the muted browns, greens and greys of a tidal estuary speak more with less effort. As an experiment you might take a pan of Paynes Grey watercolour and make a wash; then take a large brush and run a bold wash across damp paper. Lose yourself in the colour; dive into it.
And then the birds. When we walk down to Percuil there’s only ever one sound that we are hoping for – the Curlew. The bright clarity of her developing song is almost transcendental – a rising bubbling sound followed – though not always – by the full throated cry so poignant that it creates space in empty air. Even the Buzzards overhead defer to her and the Gulls pause their hollering like broken voiced boys. The Egrets; Crows; Jackdaws; Wrens; Robins and cormorants pause respectfully as she hymns the estuary in an ecstatic burst of praise that shatters the melancholy of grey skies.
These restless, liminal places seem empty to us, but to their residents their constant filling and emptying brings food and life. Every day is a harvest festival and the abundance of visible life is matched by an even greater abundance of food beneath the waves and in the mud. Perhaps the draw of creeks, tidal flats and big skies is precisely that they are reticent, withdrawn and quiet places that make space for both wonder and melancholy and provide such a perfect backdrop to the song of the Curlew; because song is – in the end – the perfect expression of life.
The remains of an abandoned barge used as a sea defence at Purton on the River Severn.
