The Potwell Inn and the modern peasant

I’ll get to the dog later, meanwhile the fruits of a morning in the kitchen; some bread proving on the stove , some Tayberry Jam, some Dutch apple cake and a delightful but very hungry Bordeaux Mastiff.

Being a modern peasant

Like all the best thoughts, this one popped into my mind after a couple of days on the stove. Beaten back into the kitchen by 90 mph winds and repeated floods, we’ve moved into one of my favourite times of the year – the pre-Christmas cookathon. In the last couple of weeks I’ve made the Christmas puds, the Christmas cake and a Dundee cake plus a lot of experimental bread baking of which more later. There’s method in the madness because it involves emptying the freezer as much as possible to make room for the Christmas onslaught, as well as emptying the cupboards of all the dried fruit that’s been lurking in the larder since last year. I appreciate that the real focus should be on buying the new seasonal dried fruit that’s just coming on to the market but I’ve never been that organised. I’ve often mentioned here that I get the feeling I’m channeling my Mum when I cook the Christmas food. It was she who taught my sister and me to bake bread and make the cakes and puddings. She taught me to make Yorkshire puddings with an unforgettable demonstration of the specific gloppy sound of a batter at just the right thickness. I admit that I dropped the added bicarb in greens as soon as I could, but the basics were all there.

This mindfulness of the past is an essential peasant quality. Peasant consciousness is filled with connections – with seasonality; with location; with nature; and all of them forged into instinctive knowledge. My Mum could judge the approaching weather by looking into the sky and seeing what was going on over Granny Perrin’s Nest which I could never see! She’d never used anything other than an outside earth closet until she’d lived her first decade in the Chilterns. She knew the flowers by their local folk names which makes it difficult to know what she was actually describing when she talked about her favourite flower – Ladies Slipper – which is used for seven flowers in Somerset alone.

I hate the way we use the word “peasant” to denigrate people whose knowledge is so profoundly integrated and I much prefer the French paysan which embodies the sense of rootedness and place; of flora and fauna and of the knowledge of how to grow things well and how to heal them; how to cook and eat and how to move in a landscape without damaging it. Peasant speech is full of earthy, hard won wisdom – not from the latest scientific paper but from generations of experience. My Grandfather Tommy Cox whose family had lived in Stoke Row since the eighteenth century; so long that the village had both Cox’s Cottages and Cox’s Lane within its boundaries, would say of cow manure – “There’s more heart in a sheep’s fart!”. He was a self-taught carpenter who gave me my first slide rule; taught me how to use logarithms and helped me build my first radio sets. He was as far from stupid as you could get; the prototype of all modern peasants.

Peasant knowledge lives in the hands and fingers, in the senses of touch and vision, taste and smell; in the ability to mend and repair; to ride the waves when the going gets tough, in the collaborative community of mutual aid and barter. All this came back to me as I was writing my talk on AI and plant phone apps. Yes we can use the correct name – in Latin too – but do we even begin to see what my Mum saw? do we know if Ladies Slipper was an almost extinct orchid, or perhaps a more common Kidney Vetch whose specific name “vulneraria” suggests healing properties. Was she laughing because she knew the name, on that walk back from the Crown at Parkfield when the old man passing us described the Dandelions my sister had picked as “piss the beds”. She was the most larcenous mother in history. Any walk around a garden would see her dropping snaffled plant material into her pre-prepared handbag. My sister is still growing one of Mum’s liberated Speedwell plants on the steps outside her flat. Both of us inherited her love of gardening and both of us have had city allotments. We two seem to have inherited that peasant blood; of growing and eating our own produce and in my passion for hand crafts.

Meanwhile it’s been radio silence on the Potwell Inn blog, largely because it’s been a pretty chaotic time, with hospital and GP appointments (we are now both officially alive!); failed hot water boiler; four named storms; dentist appointments – we like to squeeze them all in while we’re not off camping; family birthdays; physiotherapy appointments; winter repairs to the camper van, a field trip to the Mendip Hills; writing a talk on artificial intelligence and wildlife phone apps which I gave last Tuesday to the Bath Natural History Society; and a four day trip to our friends in the Bannau Brycheiniog aka the Brecon Beacons – which is where the dog comes in. Last weekend we drove up to the Bannau to our friends’ smallholding. As ever it was a full four days which included loading a couple of pigs to take to the local slaughterhouse, and trips to Brecon and Talgarth where we watched a dozen or more Red Kites milling around in search of scraps from the local butcher who feeds them. Red Kite were a rarity a few years ago and now they’re fanning out across the country. They don’t kill their prey but are mainly carrion eaters – tidying up and reaping where others have sown. Recently we saw approaching fifty milling around a rubbish tip north of Rhayader and it can only be a matter of time before we fickle humans start to regard them as a bit of a nuisance and accuse them of stealing babies from their prams.

Much of the weekend was occupied by fun cooking, and we worked together to produce a lavish Sunday lunch from their own produce. Star of the show was a largish lamb joint which was placed on the side while we ate. Almost unnoticed the dog’s enormous head appeared silently above the counter and he took the whole joint in his jaws – slinking silently off followed by the irate owner and our friends who had nurtured the sheep. As Sam Weller might have said whilst describing a human kerfuffle in Pickwick Papers- “collapse of stout party!”

A revelation in the breadmaking department

I’ve had a breakthrough on the hunt for the perfect sourdough loaf. I’ve always gone with the prevailing wisdom (i.e. fashion) which insists that loaves should be bursting through their crusts with what’s known in the trade as spring, and with crusts as hard as hell that lacerate your mouth, and crumb that’s full of holes through which butter runs and greases your armpits. If it’s also got a pH around 2 and keeps you up all night with acid re-flux that just proves how hard you are. Of course some of these aims are mutually contradictory, for instance it’s virtually impossible to get anything other than a brick out of 100% wholemeal grains, and your four year old sack of flour bought during lockdown wouldn’t rise even with the addition of plastic explosive. As ever, ruthless orthodoxy is a blind alley with a big argumentative crowd of evangelical artisan bakers at the end.

What we’ve always wanted was rich sourdough flavour from a tin loaf with a regular cross section for slicing and toasting and a flavoursome crust with good colour which is soft enough to eat but adds to the whole taste – like the breakdown on good cheese; the bit between the rind and the main body which, by the way, I love. In search of this goal I just bought three black iron bread tins which are just fantastic – heavy and needing regular care but never washed. I bought a similar French crêpe pan twenty years ago which never ever sticks. But the real change was of mindset. I’ve always been the kind of cook who would slavishly follow the recipe or instructions in search of so-called perfection. But over recent years, and as my experience deepens, I’ve become more thoughtful; more creative and more willing to branch out. The arbiters of sourdough orthodoxy have always tended towards a ruthless rejection of yeast. Purity is everything – even though sourdough starters must naturally vary greatly. I’ve got two; both rescued from my own neglect; one (called Tigger) was grown from some dried flakes on a dead starter tub and the other (Eeyore) came from the impoverished and terminally sick original. Tigger took off like a rocket – hence the name, and Eeyore was always slower but after months of comparison bakings much nicer and better adapted to the Potwell Inn timetable.

The breakthrough came when I came across Ken Forkish’s book “Evolutions in Bread” and skimmed into a page that described adding conventional dried yeast to the initial sourdough batter after maturing it overnight. You’ve no idea how I resisted the very idea of polluting my sourdough, but I tried it with some leftover supermarket flour and to my great surprise the combination of black iron tin and a sprinkle of yeast halfway through gave just the kind of softer, moister texture with all of the genuine flavour that we were looking for. The photo shows the third batch using Eeyore starter, the heavyweight tin and my favourite organic traditional flour.

The talk

So finally, the talk to the Bath Natural History Society was last Tuesday and as luck would have it, I was speaking in the next door room to A C Grayling the philosopher. He popped his head around the door and I was able to offer my condolences for having to share the evening with me, even if we were in different rooms. He seemed to bear it bravely. As it was I had an audience of around 35 (I didn’t count) – including 3 Vice County Recorders and two national authorities – so anyone with more brains than me would have been intimidated but I was well prepared for a degree of hostility; AI raises very strong feelings so in full diplomatic mode I kicked off with a faked photo of a ghost orchid made (by our son) using Google Gemini. Things could only get better after that, I thought.

As it was the talk went pretty well – I wasn’t aiming at the experts but at the newer members who are quite intimidated by conspicuous upstaging in Latin. I treated it as a kind of seminar where it was acceptable to lob questions at the participants – only one of whom appeared to have nodded off. He paid rapt attention for the rest of the talk. Given that I’d had to teach myself an entirely new programme and use a bunch of software on equipment I’d never seen before, my feared wipeout didn’t happen and the presentation ended just at the moment I caught sight of Madame tapping her watch. What a coincidence!

Empty and running on air – bliss!

Christmas puddings in the washing up bowl

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.

Reunion with an old flame

Ignore the old bloke and feast on the Griffin six stroke gas engine

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.

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.

A Mendip wordfest!

The upper end of Velvet Bottom

Where else in the world could you get the sheer sensual pleasure of writing “buddle pit”; “Velvet Bottom”; and “swallet” in the same sentence? That’s a rhetorical question because there’s no other correct answer except Charterhouse, a tiny hamlet in the Mendip hills, surrounded by what’s called gruffy ground -an area that’s been surface mined for lead and occasionally copper since Roman times if not before that. The names themselves have a vaguely erotic undertone, like West Country soft-porn – unless, that is, you’ve actually been there; and if you’ve been reading this blog for any time you’ll know that it’s one of my favourite places on earth.

So today we decided to celebrate the late autumn and early winter by going for a wander down the valley. It’s an extraordinarily rich environment. Years ago we took the boys for a walk there and spotted two of the biggest adders we’d ever seen – sunning themselves at the bottom of the shallow pit in the photo at the top. This pit, and others further down the valley are the buddle pits where the pounded lead ore was left to settle – the heaviest and richest falling to the bottom. Obviously a pretty dirty and polluting process, and a new sign board near the best preserved dam describes how an angry mob from Cheddar came up and destroyed some of the head works because the polluted water had travelled underground and was emerging in Cheddar where it was killing the fish. The story of pollution – painfully familiar today – didn’t end in Victorian times because not so long ago the residents of Shipham, nearby, were told not to eat produce from their gardens because of residual cadmium pollution from the same group of mines.

Of course this marginal post-industrial landscape is a paradise for plant hunters and is, nowadays, a great place to find some rare plants. Today we watched three Buzzards circling beneath a mob of agitated seagulls which had been enjoying the muck spreading in one of the fields above; but not much by way of wildflowers apart from a few brave Red Campions huddling down in the sheltered pits.

But there’s never a day when you don’t learn something interesting up there, and today it was a lesson in pteridology – ferns. I’m quite new to fern ID, and so I’m still at the disambiguating stage. Bracken is pretty easy, but down in the valley today it was accompanied by almost equal numbers of Common Male ferns. In summer and from a distance the way to tell them apart is that bracken just spreads untidily whereas Male Fern grows in scruffy but obvious shuttlecocks. Today we could see that the bracken in winter dies back to a familiar pale brown, whereas the Male fern turns almost black as it dies back. You can see it quite clearly in the photo at the top, as you can equally see that some kind of banding is going on with the Bracken and Male Fern each having their own preferred spot. All these clues add up towards an instinctive recognition of the jizz of a species. Elsewhere, and all the way down the track, we could see where badgers had been scraping the grass back looking for something to eat.

We stopped and ate a sandwich at Black Rock quarry and then strolled back up rather more quickly as an early sunset was likely under the thick cloud. A nice walk.

Well I promised I’d report back

First attempt at the Ken Forkish method.

I realize, of course, that you may not be as fascinated as I am by sourdough baking; allotmenteering; campervanning; walking; field botany or green spirituality – and if you are fortunate enough not to be bothered by any of them I have no idea why you’re even reading this. My ordinary life would probably be seen as exceptionally boring by most sane people; but then, “ordinary” – to me – is completely fascinating. I sometimes stare at people in a way they might find disconcerting, because every human life is a limitless mystery even if it’s mostly taken up by stuff that’s never going to make it into the newspapers. Even our greatest idiocies and betrayals are crept up on an inch at a time rather than recklessly embraced in an eyes meeting across a crowded room sort of way. We fall in love and fall out of it again; laugh, bawl our eyes out and have cuddles that range from routine maintenance to OMG; love our children and hate them with equal ferocity. We indulge in self-pity and skulduggery, yet occasionally amaze ourselves with an unexpected act of kindness – so yes, I like ordinary, in fact I like it a lot more than exceptional or exciting, an attribute that probably places me on some kind of spectrum.

And having got that off my chest I can write that my new Forkish method loaf came out of the oven just before bedtime last night and it had pancaked spectacularly, exactly as I had anticipated. The whole method was a nightmare of never previously experienced textures; slimy; sticky; cold and wet like a barrel of pilchards. However that wasn’t the end of it because this morning when I hacked a lump off it and spread it with a lustrous layer of butter (I thought I’d better give it half a chance of delighting me) it had all of the rich flavour of my usual bread if a little bit (pleasantly) more acidic. The crust was thinner and much less tooth breaking than usual and the crumb – the actual inner, bread bit – was fabulous. The biggest failing was the collapsed shape which might make one giant flying saucer shaped sandwich if you sliced it horizontally through the middle. The only unforgivable fault was a stratum of flour that must have got there when I tipped more in at a late, panicked, stage and failed to mix it in properly. All in all it was a slow but encouraging first step.

I’ve only got one piece of black iron cookware in the kitchen – a twenty year old crêpe pan that’s never seen the washing up after hundreds if not thousands of crêpes and which never ever sticks. Sadly the new anti-pancake black-iron bread tin got lost in the post when it was sent from Wellington to Bridgewater and then unaccountably to Birmingham instead of Bristol so stage two of the sourdough adventure will have to wait. But even more ordinary screw-ups adorned the day with the blocked sewer downstairs finally being unblocked, but the hot water cylinder in the bathroom springing a leak. Madame was well grumpy by this time and we slept in an uncomfortable silence while the bathroom bucket filled a drip at a time with expensive warm water. On the plus side I had the first civil conversation ever with our landlord’s agent who, after years of getting annoyed with me, has realized that I’m not just grumbling about the black mould to annoy her. Later today we went to the van (you see how ordinary this all is!) and booked in at the garage to get a new cam belt fitted – an expensive job that had me searching the mechanic’s eyes for signs of dissembling : me thinking are you shitting me up? and him thinking (with his best poker face on) “he thinks I’m shitting him up; and him a retired Vicar!” There is, unaccountably, a six week minimum waiting list for this hideously expensive service but I don’t care – our campervan is what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a transitional object, although I think he had rather smaller things like cuddly blankets and teddy bears in mind. It gets us through the darkest days just by being there as a promise of better things to come.

Confession

December 2022

Many years ago before the church drove out the last threads of organised religion from my mind, I used to go to confession in a church carefully chosen miles from home in order that I wouldn’t be recognized. Father Barnard was an old school Anglo Catholic who reputedly slept in his cassock. The first time I went there I was surprised to see the church half full of people, but I soon realized why. Father Barnard was as deaf as a post and so any thought of private confession went out of the window. You had to shout your sins at him – greatly to the amusement of the gathered crowd. Having blurted out your private shame he would invariably dispatch you to the back of church to say the same psalm. It never varied – same old same old – and it was truly cathartic.

Anyway, and in search of the same sense of release I’m offering my full confession to a grave sin, committed this morning in full knowledge of the error of my ways. I added yeast to a sourdough loaf. There we are then, I’ve got it off my chest. A heretical book, well-known to the authorities, has tempted me from the path of righteousness, and lured thousands of us pale and unhealthy backsliders into sin. In a burst of what the Jungians call synchronicity, the sewer in the basement has been blocked and is flooding as a kind of divine retribution and our water heater has developed a leak. The management company has failed to respond to any of our complaints because – as we all know – old people have nothing important to do and so can be safely shunted to the end of the queue. Grumble grumble grumble!!

The plan is to make a serviceable white loaf that lasts a few days and can be cut for sandwiches but tastes great at the same time. Shop bread is so full of preservatives it never seems to go off – you just wake up one morning to find it’s grown a green fur coat. It’s early days, but after following the instructions to the letter I’ve got a sticky, sloppy and wet mass of dough that looks destined to pancake when it hits the oven. I’ve already weakened and added more flour to the dough but I’m not hopeful. Never mind I’ll see it through to the bitter end and – as the politicians always seem to say – lessons will be learned. However it turns out I promise I’ll publish a photo for your entertainment. But yeast in a sourdough loaf? I may never forgive myself.

Winter camping – here we come!

Pen y fan in February 2016

Did I mention that we love going to the Bannau Brycheiniog – the Brecon Beacons – or, according to the spellchecker here on my laptop, the “banana strychnine”. Every year as the clocks go back and it gets dark so painfully early, we try to squeeze in one last camper-van trip before we drain the water tank and pull the curtains. Summer is never long enough. It’s over now to fungi and ferns and we managed to fit in a walk around the woods on the Mendips last week which was disappointingly light on fungi but challenging on the fern front. I remember well the early days when I thought there were just Dandelions until I discovered that they were just a small part of a huge group. These discoveries always leave me equally exhilarated and depressed. On our walk, and with a good deal of hands and knees stuff, I confirmed what I already knew in my heart of hearts – that not all green and ferny looking things are called Bracken (any more than all overweight white middle class men in Rohan trousers are called Dave). At once, exhilarated and depressed, I lashed out on a couple (more) ferny books and settled down for a good read. I am abashed; vanquished; and breathlessly looking forward to a ferny bash in the Bannau.

So it’s been a bit of a week – two exhibitions; Paula Rego and Goya at the Holburne Museum and Rinko Kawauchi: “At the edge of the everyday world” at the Arnolfini in Bristol; an excellent talk by the Director of the Holburne at BRLSI and two films – “The Outrun” in Bath and “A sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” – both of them lovely; the second, showing at the Watershed was a biopic of Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham a shamefully neglected modernist artist. After the usual depressing few autumn weeks we felt like students again, bathing in fountains of glittering inspiration. Of course the payback came with exhaustion and an urgent call to the doctor when my heart rate went down to 45 and blood pressure to 92/61. I’d have to have been a saint not to laugh when the doctor told me that my symptoms were caused by the drugs I was prescribed to cure the symptoms! I don’t want to expire in a Kafkaesque cycle of thwarted goodwill.

Anyway, the sun’s shining and we’ve booked a spot alongside the Monmouth and Brecon canal. I’ve also been sorting through hundreds of old flower photos but I’m held up by the absence of replies to emails requesting bits of information. If this army of citizen scientists is ever going to live up to its immense promise, the learned institutions need to get over themselves and answer emails from those of us without PhD’s. But then I’m a bit of a loner and the least clubbable person you could imagine. Madame is the only person who comes (dangerously) close to “getting” me – we even hold hands in bed: dangerous!

Finally, I’ve yielded to temptation and bought a black iron bread tin. I’ve had enough of pancake sourdough loaves. Tigger and Eeyore the two starters are going well, and so I’ll re-unite them during the week and start some experiments to create an organic sourdough loaf that stands up enough to make a sandwich with a soft enough crust not to rip the roof of my mouth or snap teeth off. Then when that’s done I’m going to write a long letter to Keir Starmer to explain that his job is not to shuffle bits of spreadsheet around like a junior manager in a shoe shop, but to reunite managerial competence with a bit of visionary leadership and some ethical backbone which he seems to have lost somewhere along the way.

More sourdough blah blah

Sorry about the spelling.

My friend Don kept a small flock of chickens in his orchard and I remember him telling me that there was one elderly bird in particular which would not lay an egg for weeks – but if he happened to mention in the bird’s presence that it would have to go to the pot he would invariably find an egg the next day. I think Eeyore, my elderly and neglected sourdough starter has a similar temperament. It’s all my own fault, of course, I neglected it shamefully for months because among many other things I didn’t feel like doing, I especially didn’t feel like making bread; far too optimistic an activity for a man sunk deep in melancholia and self-pity. Maybe that should simply read “self pity” because melancholia is essentially a posh middle-class euphemism for it. The stages of starter decrepitude are slow but very visible. No bubbles rise and burst on the surface like methane from a muddy lake bed. It sits there and glowers at me as gradually the golden liquor separates from the sludge and I begin to imagine it will soon be a stinking mess. That happened once many years ago and when I eventually sprang the top on the container the most dreadful smell burst out like a vengeful demon. In the end I had to throw the starter and its container away; both irredeemably contaminated.

I have read about keen but recently converted sourdough penitents advertising for surrogate parents to look after their starters while they pop out to the shops for a morning. This is never necessary because, like all living things, the whole life of a starter strains towards survival and reproduction and so Tarquin’s shopping is astonishingly unlikely to threaten its continued existence. Take heart! sourdough starters can survive almost any catastrophe except being tipped down the sink.

I’ve written about my attempts to revive the original starter but, briefly I fed the original one – maybe 15 years old – and miraculously not at the stinking stage – and watched it sulk for a week or so without so much casting a pinhead bubble. But I also scraped half a gram of dried starter off the top of the pot, added (tap) water and dark rye flour and watched in wonder as it sprang into vigorous action. I’ve never given my starter a name but I decided to call the old one Eeyore and the new one Tigger. Tigger did so well I was able to make the first loaf after a couple of days, which may have been around the time when I mentioned in the presence of Eeyore that I was going to have to let him go. Eeyore responded the next day by throwing a thick foaming head – just like the good old days. The Potwell Inn bakery was back in business and I was able to make side-by-side comparisons of the two starters. Unsurprisingly, (they are genetically identical), there was no difference and we are able to eat decent bread again after a long hiatus of melancholy and indigestion.

The new flour – 100% Maris Widgeon – is demanding some experimentation with baking times and temperatures to avoid the much sought after, (by masochists), palate ripping crust which neither Madame or me enjoy; and thirty six hour proving seems to make a better crumb texture; but then, I’m irredeemably excited by poorly designed experiments with too many variables to draw any conclusions. The sourdough world is full of overly masculine imagery with extreme temperatures and impossible physicality built into the mystique, combined with slashing and frequent applications of cold water. But better than all that nonsense; the Potwell Inn is filled with the fragrance of baking bread once again and the world seems a better place for it.

Starter or non-starter?

I mentioned on Tuesday that I’ve returned to bread making after quite a long break, and re-started my sourdough starter. In fact the one I made from about 1/2 gram of dried starter flaked from the rim of the original container and given a couple of days feeding, has done so well I made a loaf with some (probably stale) leftover flour in the absence of a delivery from the mill. The resulting loaf in the photo above was pretty good,and so I’ve re-christened the two starters Eeyore and Tigger for fairly obvious reasons. The flour I’ve ordered is made from organic Maris Widgeon wheat which is less productive (50% less than Canadian hard wheat for example) and more expensive but is slightly lower in protein and, the millers claim, perfect for slow proving. I’ve been lowering the protein level by adding cake flour to the mix – which works after a fashion. Breakfast today was a joy!

But we’ve also been busy on other fronts as well. The allotment, mercifully, is pretty well closed down for the winter except for picking the apples; the winter crops will sit quietly in this awful weather. It seems that if you have about ten fruit trees you’re entitled to call it an orchard. We’ve got ten so we can talk about our orchard with a contemptuous toss of the head to those poor souls with only five. Yesterday Madame made a Dutch apple cake and we’ve had stewed apple every day for ages. The great thing about seasonal food is that it almost always runs out before you get sick of it.

Back in the flat I’ve been sifting through thousands of photos of unidentified wildflowers; giving them names, dates and locations – which is a massive undertaking – and then building a database. I’ve got a good memory for where I first saw a plant and so sticking a pin in the OS map for the ones that preceded phone cameras, isn’t as hard as it sounds. So far I’ve got 320 ram stamped entries, all double checked and accompanied by photographic evidence.

Last night we went to a lecture on modern art in Bath, given by the Director of the Holburne Museum. Apparently the City Council allowed a nationally important collection of craft ceramics including the Leach archive to go to Farnham and the national photographic collection to be taken to Bradford. What a huge loss to the city! In return we got the nationally trivial Crest Nicholson development south of the river which looks like a Russian bonded warehouse and was so badly built it’s pretty well bankrupted them with compensation payments which are a closely guarded secret because they’re trying to sell the business before anybody notices! Ah joy – Bath has a Director of Heritage but no head of cultural activities. They say it’s Jane Austin and the Roman Baths that bring the tourists in; but the traffic down Milsom Street towards the shops is always greater than the traffic in the other direction.

So there we are. All’s well with the Potwell Inn and tomorrow we’re off to the Mendips on a fungus hunt before it starts raining again.

Outsider wins sourdough barmy race

The 50:1 outsider wins!

Maybe I spoke too soon. I was so pleased that the original sourdough starter hadn’t actually died, I implied – OK bragged – that it was indestructible. However, when I added a feed of dark rye flour to the original batch I also scraped off a few tiny flakes of starter that had dried out (maybe 1/2 gram)and were stuck to the rim of the old fermentation jar, then dropped them into a jam jar with some tepid water and a tablespoon of dark rye flour and left them both on one side overnight.

In the morning the old faithful had thrown a few sulky bubbles but otherwise nothing; however the homeopathic flakes in the jam jar had bubbled up all over the worktop and when I unscrewed the lid there was a healthy hiss. It was so eager to make bread I transferred it into some luxury Tupperware accommodation, fed it again since when it’s been growling at me from above the stove. Tonight I shall make a batter with some leftover organic flour; but I’ve ordered a trial batch of Shipton Mill organic Maris Widgeon flour and I’ll start experimenting with that when it arrives. Baking is such a joyful activity and it annoys me that many so-called experts make it sound difficult. It really isn’t. Sure, the whole process takes maybe 36 hours but of that it takes 10 minutes to make the batter, maybe 20 minutes to weigh out the ingredients and knead, and 35 minutes to bake. Aside from that you can do something useful; make lists, identify plants fill databases and write blogs. What’s not to like?

Oh and sorry – the English insult “barmy” derives from the excited way the yeast bubbles out of its container – the barm pot. There’s one on my stove.