Doing the right thing in a headwind

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

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

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

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

The allotment – gym to the virtues
And your point is ….?

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

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Kynance Cove today – thank goodness the cafe was open.

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Mystical Remainder

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

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

Storm brewing – in every sense!

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Rain clouds gathering over Lizard point today

The weather in Cornwall has been pretty terrible since we’ve been here, but we’ve managed to get out for a walk on most days. So far it’s always culminated in rain, and most of the time it’s been blown in by storm winds. Last night it was so strong I could make out the somewhat orchestral sounds of the timpani as waves crashed into the cliffs and the shingle harbour below us, then there was what Matthew Arnold called “the melancholy soft withdrawing roar” of the waves retreating from the shingle beach; clattering and sharp, more brassy than soft last night, like a chorus of a thousand stonechats – and then the woodwinds battering and flickering around the windows searching for gaps to whistle in. There are times when we miss being in the campervan, but not last night. Yesterday morning we tried to walk across to the Caerthillian valley to do a botanical reconnaissance in preparation for another visit in spring, but we were beaten by the cold wind and retreated to the pub for fish and chips. Then I spent the rest of the day researching how so many rare plants manage to survive the soil round here, with high levels of magnesium (poisonous to most plants) low levels of nitrogen, and low levels of calcium. It turns out that the magic trick is to grow in conjunction with invisible underground fungal networks which have almost magical powers to search out water and convert the dodgy soil into food for the plants while blocking the baddies in return for a share of the plants’ photosynthesized sugars. It was an afternoon well spent I think, leaving me excited that at the very core of nature lies millennia of cooperation. The rarities simply couldn’t exist without each other.

Naturally the Lizard, beautiful though it is, is not the center of the universe and elsewhere, politicians are busily trying to reverse that process of mutuality and convert our once rich culture into serpentine dust. You should treat that last sentence as a metaphor. The current news is as depressing and disturbing as it could possibly be. I’m very used to seeing the degradation of Cornwall through neglect, but that attitude which was so apparent in the past where it was said that at the bottom of any hole you could find a Cornishman, but it was rarely mentioned that at the top there was almost always an Englishman stuffing the money into his pockets. Now the contagion is spreading through the whole country as decades of neglect through profiteering are too obvious to be covered up by corporate or government doublespeak. There’s an ugly mood afoot and it’s growing so quickly that even a quiet stroll down a quiet seaside lane is compromised and diminished by fearful thoughts of the coming storm.

A little list

Montbretia (Crocosmia), Winter Heliotrope, Hart’s Tongue fern, Tree Mallow, Pellitory of the wall, Common Gorse, Foxglove, Sea Beet, Nettle, Black Spleenwort, Alexanders, Sea Radish, Purple Dewplant, Sea Carrot, Hottentot Fig, Bramble, English Stonecrop (17 species)

When we say that the Lizard is one of the most biodiverse places in the country, that little (and very incomplete) list is only the beginning. I’ve seen many of them in the centre of Bath, and the seaside specialists pop up along the whole of the west coast. But this was just a brisk fifteen minute walk in the rain alongside a lovely Cornish hedge. If we had time and a great deal of patience we could find over 900 in just this small area. You can rightly feel as if you’re touching a great beauty here.

How to flourish and live beautiful lives in a hostile world should concern us more than it often does. As nature struggles from extractive farming, chemical desolation , carbon dioxide, global heating and polluted rivers we’re neither winners or beneficiaries of all that bogus productivity. We’re the victims. We need to demand more than lowlife chicanery from our politicians, the so-called tech titans and the client media who feed us poisonous lies. Across the green from us there’s a man who’s probably got severe mental health issues and regularly bellows “The earth is burning“, sometimes for an hour at a time. He’s not wrong.

Spring has definitely sprung here

It cost us a soaking, but we went down to Poltesco this afternoon to see what we could see and came up with these lovely spring flowers. There were more, but the rain defeated us even though it was glittering in sheets and drifts through the sunshine. Last night’s talk at the Village Hall brought back a thousand memories, not least because the speaker was using photographic slides which occasionally found themselves upside down or skipped past by the eager operator. The hall has just been refurbished so – to defeat all the stereotypes – it was warm and comfortable and there was a sound system that worked so well I could hear the speaker. The subject was the Lizard flora, and the speaker talked for 2 hours without any notes. It was a real tour de force that left me making frantic notes in the dark. They turned out to be illegible but I rewrote and researched the gist of it this morning and I’ve the beginnings of an accurate list of plants and locations.

In fact we’re here at quite the wrong time to see many of the local riches. I did a quick database search of a small area of the Lizard and where at home I might expect to find 250 – 300 species, here there are over 900. The result of hearing all that local wisdom and experience is that we now have a very clear idea of where to look and what to look for and we’ve already decided to come back with the campervan in May.

Full Moon, Snow Moon, Imbolc

Full moon tonight on the Lizard peninsula

Imagine a world with no calendars and no clocks; how would you cope with the passage of time? When to sow seeds? when to harvest? When to prepare for the long period without much fresh food? when to eat up stored food before it spoils. Of course the answer must be that you’d still have the sun whose day length waxes and wanes just like the moon does. The moon offers a different account of the seasons of great significance to sailors and fishermen but both mark the year. A solar calendar and a lunar calendar. The deep sky at night offers another cycle through the alignments of the stars. These are all natural calendars which align more or less with the seasons. The ancestors thought it important enough to build an observatory at Stonehenge.

Because those weasel words ‘more or less‘ highlight the difficulty that our imagined ancestors faced. When exactly do the days begin to shorten and when do they start to lengthen again? This, along with ‘when is high summer?’ and ‘when midwinter?’ is a matter of exquisite importance to the farmer and horticulturalist. However we’re not the same as those ancestors because we have atomic clocks and science and we live in the tailwind of the Christian centuries here in the UK. In addition we largely have very little to do with the growing and harvesting seasons. So we have a kind of rich sedimentary history of our relationship with time and the seasons are still as important to us emotionally as they were when we were tending the land and sailing the seas. Seasons without markers, without celebrations would leave a large part of our culture inaccessible.

Many centuries ago when St Augustine of Canterbury arrived here from Rome, he discovered a largely pagan society. The Romans brought Christianity to England and when they left they left a vacuum into which paganism flowed back. Augustine wrote an anguished letter to the Pope recounting the apparently pagan natives worshipping in non Christian temples. The Pope wrote back and said take them back and rename the pagan festivals with Christian saints’ names. I imagine the people didn’t care very much whose badge was over the door and the pagan festival was never truly lost. Christmas overlaid midwinter, and the Nine Lessons and Carols was always good for seeing the village unite, and so on. Easter was a bit of a problem because it was attached to an old lunar calendar festival called oestre (work that one out!). So we now have the residues of ancient paganism overlaid by Roman Christianity, overlaid by a newer Germanic form of paganism, overlaid once again with monastic Christianity, then the Catholic hegemony overlaid by Protestant Christianity and finally by modern agnosticism and scientific rationalism. The key point is that all of these continue to function actively (if unnoticed) within our minds.

Let’s be clear, I intensely dislike the term “paganism” because its negative and critical connotations attack a way of life which has never gone away. But when I used the word ‘sedimentary‘ I meant that these historical cultural layers never really go away; they still resonate and still awaken memories which are closer in time to us than we often know. Hands up anyone who went to a wassail in the last few weeks!

All of which is to remember a festival which is the process of being revived. True to form, in Ireland it’s a festival dedicated to St Brigid but it goes back much further. How, we ask, do we know that winter is ebbing and spring flowing. When we view the question through the series of sedimentary orthodoxies we see that it has various dates in modern times – Winter Solstice represents the shortest days, but when do we begin to notice days getting longer. Christmas is far too soon after solstice to see the days really lengthening. By the Spring solstice around March 21st it’s obvious and if you’re a farmer you might have missed the boat. But the pagan feast of Imbolc is enjoying something of a revival because even in the grip of winter storms, we can all see the days lengthening. We’ve turned the corner – and it’s today.

Kynance Cove – never disappoints.

The advantage of going on an organised field trip is that you can see all sorts of plants and have them identified by an expert. The downside is that the finds are identified by an expert and so you miss the best bit, which is to answer the question what’s this plant that I’ve never seen before called by going through the books and if it’s at all rare, eliminating every other possibility.

There’s an exceptionally rare plant that only grows on the Lizard in Cornwall called Land Quillwort- Isoetes histrix and we’ve been hunting for it for several years because it’s very tiny and hard to spot (about the size of a 5p piece), and it grows in winter and dies back in February – which isn’t a time that we usually come down here because there’s so much more going on in March and April. Booking a cottage in mid-winter in the hope of finding a single specimen is way beyond our pain threshold usually but the way half term worked out this year meant that the rentals go up from ridiculous to astronomic the moment the schools break up; so here we are battling the storms and driving rain refinding what seems to be the best candidate up on the clifftop. It’s a fussy little plant that prefers thin soils on the serpentine rock and positively thrives on being inundated with water for at least part of the year while laughing at droughts during its summer rest. So for whatever reason we’ve always rejected it in the past. It could have been a Spring Squill but that’s got big bulbs, or thrift but that only looks the same very early in the season and doesn’t have bulbs but tangled roots and you can often see the dried flower heads from last season. There’s such a short window of opportunity. But the date is bang on, the situation and environment are right and the location within the 10K map square came from the big database.

So today the ducks lined up, it stopped raining and the sun shone so we returned to the same spot; I had a better idea of what I was looking for and my confidence grew from 30% to 90% – which is as far as it ever gets! We’d found and photographed a Land Quillwort and – as always happens – once you’ve seen one you can find all the others. We also photographed Cornish Heath – another rare one which we’ve never recorded before although we’ve seen it and guessed it probably was. So two rarities on record – that’s a pretty good start to the year, and we sealed the day with a celebratory bacon baguette and mug of tea down at the beach cafe while we watched the enormous swell crashing against the cliffs. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

Back in the books, though, it was distressing to read in the biography of Linnaeus and Buffon that I mentioned yesterday, how Linnaeus’ followers followed his lead in locking women out of education and dividing the human race into separate species, then sorting them in order of their supposed intelligence, thereby building a spurious theoretical framework to support slavery, racial hatred and the diminishing of women. We are so easily bamboozled when religion and science get merged into a mule species that can go nowhere and cause nothing but suffering.

Liquid sunshine in Cornwall

This photo was taken on the road to Kynance Cove. We originally intended to go to Lizard point to photograph the sea state but when I got out of the car to swipe our National Trust card I was very nearly blown off my feet by the fierce wind, and so we thought Kynance would be the better bet; but the same thing happened there. We’re between so-called named storms at the moment but you wouldn’t think so. I don’t think we’ve ever seen worse sea conditions here in half a century of visits; no wonder there’s a lighthouse down at the point. We’ve had occasional breaks in the low cloud today but for the most part it’s been a lowering slate grey, laden with Atlantic rain which its been releasing as steady drizzle when it’s not hammering down. The cloud layer was so low at times that the gulls were occasionally disappearing into it. Not quite the light rain in the Met Office forecast. The sea spray, seen from the Kynance road was topping the cliffs over 50 feet high, and you could almost feel the impact of the waves dumping on the shore, through your body. The sea itself was roiling; white and foam flecked to 100 yards out. There were just three cars in the car park when we arrived and within a few minute we were alone; the car rocking in the 50 mph gusts. As ever there were a few crows playing in the wind but they were too far away and too fast to identify. There are Choughs down at the point and they’re the greatest acrobats of all – they can even fly upside down.

So we made our way back and had a cup of tea before we went down the steep path to Cadgwith cove and took more photos there. Lizard looked like an abandoned village but there were a few people standing on the Todden in Cadgwith. They seemed quite happy but an exceptional wave could probably have taken them. John Betjeman, in one of his travel guides once described Lizard village as having all the charm of an army married quarters. It’s not pretty but it’s a very functional place where it seems entirely appropriate that one of the bar staff in the pub, was wearing an RNLI pager. There’s a primary school, a couple of pubs and a doctor’s surgery but over the years the grocery store, the big greasy spoon cafe and the post office have all gone; along with all bar a couple of the serpentine turners in their shacks.

So no moths, no plants and hardly any birds today – which gave us more time for reading. I brought some big natural history books down but I just can’t stop reading a paperback by Jason Roberts called “Every Living Thing” which won the 2025 Pulitzer prize for biography. It describes the parallel lives of two pioneering botanists with entirely different views. Linnaeus, inventor of the binomial system for naming living things and Buffon his French rival. One of the takeaway points from this book is that although Linnaeus’ fame grew and Buffon’s faded, the latter may have been on the better track, laying the foundations for later developments like the discovery of DNA. Their disputes revealed the extent to which they were both moulded and directed by the religious and societal culture of the time, and for me at least, reveals what an unpleasant man Linnaeus must have been.

Below are some pictures of the Kynance road and Cadgwith Cove today.

Back in Cornwall

If you look carefully above the familiar Beech hangar known as the Nearly Home Trees, or more properly Cookworthy Knapp you’ll see the glimmer of a wind turbine propeller blade just peeping above the trees. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to allow it to be built there but it does little to enhance a view that always lifts our spirits when we return to Cornwall. In fact it’s not actually in Cornwall at all but still in Devon – providing a useful, if overworked, scapegoat to blame for the indignity. I feel slightly guilty about calling them “Nearly Home” because we don’t live here, but we’ve both loved coming down here for over fifty years since we lived in Falmouth for a year and fell in love with the place.

Since the first time we discovered the Lizard it’s been our go-to destination. We’ve camped here, stayed in cottages when funds permitted and brought the campervan down on many occasions. Writing and drawing have always been a part of the agenda, but photographing and recording some of the amazing plants have been added to the list so we bring a faintly ridiculous amount of kit here, up to and including the portable WiFi gear that weighs far less than the portable Remington typewriter I insisted on stuffing into my rucksack on our first visit. A second and equally eccentric corner of the bag was filled by an Italian aluminium coffee percolator. The last time we stacked our kit up in the hall our neighbour asked us if we were moving out.

Storm Chandra – the latest of three named storms has changed our idea of what’s possible while we’re here. In fact I don’t remember us having a “storm season” at all until quite recently but now it’s a thing, like the monsoon season and the hurricane season. No doubt Keir Starmer will be bending every sinew to discuss the climate crisis with the Chinese government; just after he’s signed off on buying a few more nuclear power stations and secured some juicy weapons contracts. How blessed we are to have such Nelsons at the head of the ship of state, (Sorry; that sentence was auto-corrected from ” such Nellies at the head of the shit of state”).

Anyway, our journey down was largely unaffected by the storm apart from fierce rain as we drove through Devon and a 30 minute delay on the A30 when traffic was funnelled into a single lane so that four blokes could dig out a blocked drain. We were so glad of the new windscreen wiper blades! There were flooded fields to the left and right of us almost all the way, but we managed to load the car in a dry spell and once we got beyond Helston it cleared up beautifully. Chatting to a lost delivery driver this morning he told me that the side roads hereabouts are still blocked by floodwater and fallen trees, and on the television news we learned that the Environment Agency hadn’t even begun to assemble their array of mighty pumps on the Somerset Levels until storm Chandra had made landfall. There was a worrying moment as we drove through Redruth, when we heard an awful noise and smelt something like burning rubber which thankfully turned out to be outside the car and leaking in. It looks and feels like a town where whole industries go to die. They voted against the EU down here but the new A30 improvements are a stark reminder of what a few billion pounds worth of help from the neighbours can do. So now there’s fantastic roads infrastructure for the bailiffs to haul the machinery and the jobs out of the county.

Anyway we’re here and in, and after the usual hour of curses and hand-to-hand combat with the mobile router we even have the internet. It didn’t take long to Google up what’s on locally and we’ve already signed up for a talk at the village hall on Monday about the Lizard Flora. There are two rare plants that we’ve been seeking for years – one of them – Spring Sandwort – also occurs on the Mendips and although we know roughly where they ought to be we’ve never found them. But they also occur down here on the Lizard and the reason is that it’s a plant that’s tolerant of the post-industrial mine waste that occurs from lead mining on Mendip and Serpentine on the Lizard which has large surface areas of the mineral. The other plant we’d love to find is Land Quillwort which, being not much larger than a 1p coin and also not producing flowers but spores is loosely associated with ferns and is one of the plants we have in danger of becoming extinct. The Lizard is the only place it grows. So – as my Mum would have said Hope springs eternal in the hearts of the faithful (actually Alexander Pope said that first but I prefer my Mum’s identical version.

Spring Squill (I think!)

One of the problems of identifying the Quillwort is that it bears a strong resemblance to the emerging leaves of the Spring Squill which also grows here – it’s just much smaller. We were wandering on the clifftop some years ago before we got quite so interested in plants and we met a woman who was scanning the grass as only botanists do. “What are you looking for?” I asked. You probably need to know that this was before I discovered how deaf I’d become. I was sure she’d replied “squirrels” and so not wishing to display my ignorance I asked “what sort? grey or red?” – “Spring”- she answered” and then the penny dropped. I hope you’ll also be pleased to know that just before we came away I got my third set of NHS hearing aids which are absolute game changers. Apart from being able to hold a lucid conversation with Madame (my mishearings were becoming hilarious), I can now receive phone calls, listen to music and even connect them to the satnav. Madame finds this bit troubling because now I shout at thin air and have conversations with people who aren’t there.

While I was waiting to intercept the lost delivery driver at the top of the lane I chatted to a ninety year old local man who was born here and still lives in his grandfather’s house. He looked as fit as a flea, and told me how he still gets pleasure from pushing open the door knowing that his grandfather’s hand had touched the same ironwork. The air must be pretty good around here.

First trip of the year – moderately chaotic preparations.

The old Serpentine works at Poltesco.

The problem when the Potwell Inn goes on tour is that our plans for a break out invariably involve quite a few bits of kit. So a week before we set out, and perfused with optimism, we attempt to stow as many things as we could possibly need into our little (and rather old) car. The car itself needs plenty of TLC, and the campervan cost us more to run this year than an upmarket old people’s home. So this trip is by car – which entailed getting the brakes serviced and the windscreen wipers replaced in honour of the exceptionally gloomy weather predictions. The forecasts also make most of our longed for plans unattainable so we’ve also packed (just in case) for reading, drawing, mothing, botanizing and watching a load of films on DVD that we seem to remember we enjoyed at the time.

The packing has involved four quite different scenarios. The first is to spend the time walking hand in hand through dappled sunshine; finding and recording rare plants by the dozen. The second is to work our way through our collection of DVD’s and the third is to read a load of pretty impenetrable books. Options two and three may also include lively moments of conflict due to the cramped environment. Alongside all this intellectual stimulation there is the hope that the nights will be mild and windless enough to make a list of moths attracted to the new moth trap. A quick bit of research suggests that with nothing more than a gentle zephyr from a warm quarter and either a bucket of home made sugaring solution or a prolific ivy bush in flower outside the door we may even find a few volunteers for ID including some migrants without appropriate mothy passports. Madame has also packed a large quantity of paper and drawing equipment.

This one’s a 200 mile drive to the Lizard in the extreme South West of Cornwall; proper – next stop America territory. So cameras, head torch, GPS unit and hand lenses are all charged up, the boots are oiled and waterproofed and the laundry revived after the unexpected flood caused by a broken washing machine – is there a theme here? The quills were sharpened; the oak-gall ink and hand-made nettle paper were prepared (maybe I told a tiny lie there). The heat dryer passed silently, surrounded by its favourite washing at the end of December and rather like the two elderly ladies in Laurie Lee’s “Cider with Rosie” the washing machine went into terminal decline when the dryer died. So it was an interesting week.

Madame made pasties on Wednesday last to get our palates tuned for the reckless beauty of Cornish haute cuisine. Stargazy Pie and White Pudding come to mind. We’re working our way through an endless series of named storms and it seems perfectly possible that we’ll have gone through the alphabet by the end of February, so It’s a long way to drive to have your dreams dashed by Storm Zelah. On the other hand when you’re young and madly in love everything is lovely. Sadly we’ve moved on from that bit – well, at least the young bit. Wish us luck!

Two firsts – but which is the more exciting?

But in answer to a question I was asked during the week– “What was the actual millionth word?” – well you may think it was a bit of a disappointment because it was “much”. Feel free to develop any metaphorical significance you like; it’s Freedom Hall here at the Potwell Inn. The oldest existing version of St Mark’s gospel ends mysteriously with the Greek word “gar” – ‘because‘ and scholars have had a field day inventing possible reasons and even helpfully completing the book to their own tastes. In the case of the Potwell Inn, I like the word ‘much’ as much as any other but I finished the sentence in any case and after a short rest, here we are again.

Last Monday was alleged to be some novelty, named (by the media) “Blue Monday. We were all supposed to be fed-up by the endlessness of winter, the short hours of daylight and our January bank statements. I’m sorry to buck the trend but I had a lovely day which included feeling very pleased with myself for completing last year’s resolutions but also submitting 420 completed botanical records to the Vice County Recorder which, thinking about it, probably spoiled her day. But maybe the crowning moment was finding a Lesser Celandine in flower on one of the two main roads into Bath. Notwithstanding the pouring rain and wind it brought a touch of spring into our hearts. It was in a half-starved looking garden just opposite the derelict hotel where the police were busy removing 700 cannabis plants from an illegal factory. You see, in Bath there’s no need for a writer to make stuff up – it just comes along, barely 50m from where we live. The smell of cannabis was so strong nearby that we called the spot “Skunk Corner” and wondered how the residents managed to survive their habits. It may well turn out that they lived blameless lives, living next door to the extractor fans, which would be a great example of blaming the victim.

The Celandine wasn’t the first exciting plant of the year. That was the Greater Dodder that was found climbing up a riverside nettle on the New Year plant hunt by the same Vice County Recorder whose Monday I may have turned blue. Sorry about that. The Dodder was – if not rare, certainly very unusual which bears out my belief that the place to look for rarities begins as you step out of the door. The VCR, Helena, was kind enough to email back and say that some of my records were interesting. Chatting to our friend Charlie yesterday – he’s South African – he said that was a classic example of British understatement. On the other hand, they might be 90% wrong which is why we all have to hand in our homework for review. We don’t overdo praise here in the UK.

But if you were to ask me to say which find was the most important, then I’d say the Celandine was most important and exciting to me and the Greater Dodder was more important to science, with the rider that whilst Celandines may be ubiquitous, like House Sparrows, Starlings and Turtle Doves once were – if we don’t record them they might begin to disappear too. But the most important reason for my ranking the Celandine highest is that it’s one of the most noticeable markers for Spring. Ever reliable, easy to find and bright in colour so they show themselves in hedgerows, they always gladden the heart. However grey, cold and wet the weather the Celandines will announce the turbo-charged arrival of the new plant hunting season.

We’re off to the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall for a break but the weather outlook is pretty awful. Nonetheless we’ve been checking our plant hunting equipment – hand lenses, GPS unit, charging batteries, testing cameras and SD cards, packing bags and running tests on the new moth trap, choosing books and waterproofs. So we don’t expect too much from the weather and probably the moths will be hard to find but whatever happens we’ll have fun and if the worst comes to the worst I’ll finish reading three big books, two on fungi and a new one on hedgerows. The allotment is tucked up for the winter and the trail cam is busy with visits from fox, badger, squirrel, domestic cat and – of course – rats. We’ve filmed the fox predating rats which was a heartening sight and the soil is taking a well-earned rest, although from reading my fungus books I’m discovering just how busy it is just below the surface.

I’ve also been testing Googl Gemini AI to see if it can help with my work – mostly playing with it and asking difficult questions to see what happens. It’s immensely powerful – it digested ten years of my writing in a minute and came up with a summary that was more right than wrong but still needs a pile of editing. There seems to be an algorithm that favours the more recent over the older stuff and there are one or two WTF? moments including a word I’ve never used and had to look up. I’d like to teach it to do routine and boring jobs on the spreadsheets so that I can get on with the more interesting bits.

We seem to be living in what the Chinese call “interesting times” – with what used to be regarded as responsible politicians behaving like hooligans outside the pub on a summer Friday night. Madame has suggested that we don’t watch TV or read newspapers while we’re away. It’s an attractive proposition. When I was very young my friend Eddy and I used to go occasionally to a night club in Yate. We were almost always refused admission because we were deemed too scruffy. Every Friday the bouncers would clear the club at closing time as soon as the inevitable fight broke out, and if it didn’t they would start it anyway. I tried once to point out to the bouncers that the fights were always started by young men wearing suits and not looking scruffy. Like so many occasions in my life I got into trouble for pointing out the evidence. I was thinking about this last night and I realized that this is a pattern that’s been repeated since I was about twelve. Among my many talents is a capacity to enrage people who dislike being challenged. Ah well, I’m not apologising!

Books mentioned – I recommend them all:

  • Fungi – Collins New Naturalist series: Brian Spooner and Peter Roberts
  • The Fifth Kingdom -An introduction to Mycology Brice Kendrick
  • Hedges – Robert Wolton, Bloomsbury British Wildlife Collection.