Category: Uncategorized

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!

By today the nets felt just a bit mended.

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, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…

Antigonish by Hughes Mearns 

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.

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.

26^th May 2010

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.

27^th 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

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.

Like most/all allotmenteers we, at the Potwell Inn, produce far more than we can eat; after all who likes courgettes that much? and this is the time of year when the crops start to come in fast. Also – in common with almost all our compatriot gardeners we hate throwing the stuff we can’t eat away, and so we give some away (although offers of courgettes seem remarkably unattractive), or we shove it in the freezer in the hope that one day we’ll be able think of some way to eat it. Naturally the embarrassing surplus disappears from sight for about 9 months until now, because this is the exact season when the cunning plan hits the wall. The freezer(s) are stuffed, we’ve got soft fruit flying off the plants and we urgently need more space.

It’s a week since we drove back from our very windy and grey break in St David’s and I haven’t posted because we’ve been so busy on the allotment. The bindweed is winning, the polytunnel plants needed urgent pruning and feeding, and there was no alternative but to get the damsons, raspberries, red and white currants, soups and stocks out of the freezer and do some serious jam and jelly making; fortified by some anonymous bags of soup for lunches. As for the soups, (we thought), they wouldn’t have been in the freezer at all if they’d been any good.

And so we’ve now run out of honey jars but we have another box of jams to add to the already creaking shelves, and worse still we’re hardly eating them because we’re both trying to lose weight. However Madame made summer pudding for the grandchildren today and some of our produce will go to the family at Christmas. Just imagine us as a kind of dacha. The three year old aubergines in olive oil still seem to be OK and the dill pickled cucumbers have failed to explode in the cupboard. Pickles, sauces, ketchups, jams, preserves and chutneys mature in any case and taste better after a year or two regardless of what the food hygiene purists may say. Then of course there’s sloe gin and damson vodka and …… I could go on but there are still jobs to be done in the kitchen.

That’s the thing; if you’re a keen allotmenteer you absolutely need to be a keen, or at least competent cook as well and you’ll be paid for your time and effort by the freshest tasting food you’ve ever eaten, but only if you clear out the frosted remains of fish pie or bean casserole before the last of their flavour disappears and it goes into the bin; which probably it should have done in the first place.

However, today we had a revelatory moment with one of the unlabeled soups in the fridge. The story (not the soup) goes back decades to the time when our middle son started his career as a commis chef with Stephen Markwick at Markwick’s in Corn Street in the centre of Bristol. The restaurant was in a basement, so there was no peeping through the window and, I’m bound to say it was expensive beyond the reach of our precarious finances. We ate there just once when someone took us and the food was unbelievably good. Our son moved on after a tough apprenticeship (Stephen could be very demanding) and then Markwicks closed down and he and Judy opened a small bistro called Culinaria in Redland where we sometimes went for a treat.

There was never any issue about starters for me. The Provencal fish soup was always awesome and it was almost always on, by popular demand. Then Stephen published two books – “A very honest cook” and “A well run kitchen” containing many of his most popular recipes including the soup. For years I looked occasionally at the recipe but lacked the nerve to cook it – there were a number of elements to the dish and Stephen, I knew, paid minute attention to detail. Anyway, last year our grandson wanted a lobster for his birthday – his dad after all is a chef! – and I decided to have a go at the soup with the remains, in spite of the fact I knew I would never be able to replicate it. So I sweated it out in the kitchen and made the soup, the aioli and the rouille and ……. well ……..

It was a bit of a disappointment. How could it not be? It wasn’t at all how I remembered it and I felt I’d let the side down. We ate it dutifully but it felt like a failure and so the leftovers went into the freezer unlabelled and came out today. Is resurrection too strong a word? As soon as I sipped the first drop I realized that the disappointment had come from trying to cook a lovely memory and what I was eating was a real soup that was not a clone of the remembered one but its own new thing, made by me. Oh glory it was good! My resolve is complete and I’ll do it again with gratitude in my heart for Stephen’s amazing cooking.

Anyway that’s enough soup, and apart from the kitchen and the allotment we found time to actually meet up with my sister after years of just phone calls. We had become distant for no particular reason but then when our mother was suffering from dementia we would visit her together so we could support one another – it was very emotionally draining. Then it was just blah blah and lockdowns and we drifted again. Seeing one another was wonderful and we ate joyfully in Bristol. I also got confirmation of a couple of difficult fern i/d’s from Wales which was great, and we bought a little 18V battery powered water pump to relieve some of the pressure of repeatedly carrying two at a time ten litre cans of water weighing 42 lbs in total from the cattle troughs to the plot. Oh and we managed to work in a visit to the Victoria Art Gallery to see an exhibition of quilts by Kaffe Fassett. Whoever said retirement was a well-earned rest??

Lennie died a few years back, after we left Severnside. To say he was a character would be a massive understatement. He was, for instance, the last person in the village who still spoke in a Gloucestershire dialect so thick and uncompromising that I had to dredge the silt of my childhood speech to remember the subtle but occasionally life saving difference between ‘thee‘ which was friendly and ‘you‘ which wasn’t. The texture and cadence of his speech was pure King James bible, but not as spoken by a posh London type so much as a hefted peasant; the vowels stretched and broadened by fag smoke and cider. His cap was a permanent fixture – bolted on against inclement weather but worn equally indoors and out. His wellingtons were equally joined on to his feet, but turned over at the top as a kind of one fingered salute to the village incomers with their green Royal Hunters. I never quite understood the complications of his family life but his later marriage to Beck, who brought her own extended family, was rock solid. She was always smiling and unlike Lennie, never swore – ever. But when Beck had her stroke she suddenly started to introduce extraordinary swear words at quite the wrong places in her sentences. The local middle classes were appalled of course, and gratefully retired from patronising her. After she died – we filled the church with balloons and there was a real party atmosphere at her funeral (another black mark I’m afraid). Lennie would come to her grave twice or three times a day and talk to her; tell her all the news and hope for some news back from her. We wondered if he would step back from his gardening but he carried on much as before, winning all the prizes at the Flower Show (another black mark) and modestly accepting his place in the sun as the best gardener in the village.

I loved talking to him and had ample opportunity because I allowed him carte blanche to take away as many wheelbarrow loads of manure and topsoil as he wanted. There are very few perks to being a country parson but the regular marrying, baptising and burying of those who never came to church but liked it to be there when they needed it, attracted the kind of loyalty which could stop you in your tracks. I came back one day to find twenty tons of farmyard manure dropped off in the car park outside our front door. Wood chip appeared in huge piles after I mentioned that we’d be glad to have it – and one remarkable day I drove back and saw the outline of a giant quarry lorry depositing another twenty tons of topsoil; overburden from the local quarry – courtesy of a bellringer friend. Lenny made full use of the bounty and was always up for a chat because he was probably quite lonely after Becks was gone, and also because he was tickled pink at being able to wind me up without being told off.

When I say that Lenny was a good gardener I mean a really really good gardener. A single one of his prizewinning onions heavily filled two cupped hands. The skin was polished to satin, the roots pure white and the stalks neatly tied off with raffia. It was bewildering to see three or four apparently cloned vegetables side by side in their baskets at the show; identical in every way. Runner beans at exactly fifteen inches and all ramrod straight; potatoes perfectly true to variety and tomatoes, strawberries ………. I could go on! He was generous to a fault when it came to gardening but his secrets went to the grave with him because they always do.

But the village was changing. In fifty years it had grown from a small hamlet to a suburbanized dormitory village. The old-timers were disappearing one by one and the Flower Show – Lennie had always been on the committee – was taken on by an incomer who had no sympathy for the tradition and saw the way forward as a moderniser. The day we won all the prizes was a sad day for all of us. Lennie had had a falling out – he never uttered a word on the subject to me – and he failed to enter a single class, in fact he didn’t even turn up for the show. It felt as if the world had shifted in its orbit and the prizes we won that day had “dust” written all over them. We didn’t mind being second or third best – we never minded it because Lenny was so obviously better. He was the standard we all aspired to. It was the beginning of the end for the produce section and I wished we’d told him what an epic role model he was.

There are a handful of those gardeners who inspired our lives. Perhaps one day I’ll write about my grandfather Tommy Cox; Trev; Mr King and Mr Monks, but meanwhile we’re itching for the rain to stop so we can go up to the allotment. On Saturday we top-dressed the asparagus bed with a mixture of sand and leaf mould and today we’ll give it a small feed of blood and bone in the hope it will do better this year. I’m afraid the asparagus is dining in the Last Chance Hotel. Did I mention utter ruthlessness as one of the qualities all allotmenteers need?