Tag: A History of Mr Polly

A little death – no not that kind

The gracious muddle that I prefer to write in

It’s not that I wasn’t warned – WordPress has been telling me for ages that something to do with Google apps was about to stop working but, being both lazy and unable to understand most of their technical information I ignored it and put it aside with letters from the bank and HMRC.

I ask this as a kind of rhetorical question: what could cause you most distress? …. a diagnosis of some rare but curable disease or losing your phone? Having been on three fast-track referrals for suspected cancers (none right) in as many months I can tell you that my world ended momentarily when I clicked on WordPress yesterday only to be told that “it” (no amplification) was no longer supported. It took a few minutes of intense meditation and heart-rate control to determine that the bereavement was far more limited than the extinction of ten years of work. The only thing that had happened was that a small shortcut app to the blog has been discontinued following a bit of a theological row between several behemoth sized companies about the number of blogger brains you can arrange on the head of a pin.

The remedy for this temporary extinction event was simple. I just had to search for the Potwell Inn and up popped my site with everything apparently working. However, my insatiable curiosity soon got the better of me and I ended up searching for my blog on Google Gemini, the AI app where I received a full report on the Potwell Inn which described all of my topics of interest in detail and (I thought) rather approvingly. There was a tendency to centre things on my more recent postings which gave the location of the Potwell Inn as Doynton – a small village near here where I once (maybe 50 years ago) did a talk for the young farmers but where we occasionally visit the local pub which I’m happy to give a shout-out to. The Cross House does some good food in a lovely atmosphere but it’s not the Potwell Inn, largely because the Potwell Inn – in the form that I write about – doesn’t exist anywhere except in my imagination and in my memories of HG Wells’ comic novel A History of Mr Polly from school days where it was a set book. The mere mention of the author and title should alert you to the archaeological nature of my affection for a short novel that, as a very shy and bewildered; possibly neuro-diverse teenager, built up as a safe space in my mind.

So the bad news for those of my readers who have wasted time searching for the Potwell Inn (one actually turned up on the allotment one day, and another wrote to me about one of the several imposters that actually exist in bricks and mortar) I’m sorry. The Potwell Inn is just a mental bolt-hole for an undiagnosed neuro-diverse old bloke, tumbling at speed towards his 80th year. On the other hand everything else, everything I’ve ever written about is real. Madame is my real partner of 60 years (we met when she was 15) we really have an allotment and all the plants, fungi, places and adventures are true, the campervan and it’s multiple vicissitudes is real too. So the really amusing fact is that Gemini got everything completely right about the Potwell Inn apart from one very important detail: it doesn’t exist.

Now I always thought that the power to confer existence on a being – and even the word being seems to confer some kind of existential reality – but stepping away from that whirlpool – the power to confer existence is reserved to God, or the Tao or some kind of immortal, invisible, ineffable superpower. If you look for Google Gemini in the scriptures you won’t find it lurking anywhere in the prehistory before Adam and Eve had to get their kit on in a hurry and Cain murdered Abel. I mean, seriously, Google doesn’t figure before sex and death (the subject of the only joke I can remember my lovely psychoanalytic psychotherapist Robin cracking. I’d told him about a dream I’d had of walking down Hotwells road being followed by two elephants. He replied with “I’m a Freudian, they must be sex and death!”)

Anyway, I think I’ve uncovered the Achilles’ heel of the whole AI bubble. It confers existence where it has no right. We avoid UPF’s – Ultra Processed Foods- but they only kill us one at a time. Ultra Processed Facts can kill whole families, cities, cultures; in fact there seems no limit to its potential for harm. Going back to the bible just for a moment (I promise) you might wonder why idolatry gets such a bad press; even making it to Moses’ ten most wicked things in the Guardian. The answer is that what idolatry does is worship the partial instead of the whole incomprehensible but beautiful thing. It takes the easy way around the mountain.

So to get back to the Potwell Inn, you’ll see one category that I never use – it’s the one entitled Uncle Jim. He is the violent drunkard brother of the licensee of the fictional Potwell Inn, known only as the fat lady. Gemini, by the way, can’t bring itself to use the word fat and substitutes plump thereby daring to change the text! Polly accidentally removes Uncle Jim from, well- life I suppose – in a farcically comical fight which accidentally gives him a new identity. I don’t use the Uncle Jim tag because in my version of the Potwell Inn he’s gone forever, vanquished and washed up on a beach wearing the wrong jacket. All other contenders for the Uncle Jim slot are automatically given life-bans from my pub. The little river runs gently by, unpolluted by agricultural runoff and raw sewage. Beavers build their dams upstream and wildlife flourishes on the banks. I just need one place in my head where the darkness has no dominion.

Not the Potwell Inn

In which I reveal the true identity of Uncle Jim.

Lone canoeist on the river at dusk

I picked the photograph carefully by typing “river” into my photos database and going through them carefully, waiting for the spark to happen. This was it; the Potwell Inn expressed in a single image. Incidentally my sister once told me off because, (she said), every time I wrote a lyrical piece I would throw a spanner in the works at the last moment, as if I couldn’t bear the thought of a happy ending. It was a reasonable criticism because, on reflection, that’s something I often do. Yesterday I read a single page of an essay concerning grass written by John Ruskin. I thought it was so gushing and overheated that I counted the adjectives on a single paperback sized page and there were 25. As I wrote a couple of days ago, my inner eye could scan the grasses on Mendip or – let’s say on the Lizard with interest, but alight with joy on a heap of mine spoil or bare serpentine rock. My defence would be that I’m far from being pessimistic by temperament; it’s experience!

The Potwell Inn is, and always was, my safe place. Since I read it as a set text at fourteen years old I’ve never lost the liberating sense of delight when Alfred Polly, the hero of HG Wells comic novel stumbled upon this idyllic pub with its own ferry after running away from his own bungled suicide which (long story) resulted in inadvertently burning his hated shop down and heroically rescuing an elderly woman from the blaze. From that moment all my ambitions centred upon finding my own Potwell Inn and my very own landlady. Someone – was it William Goldman? – once wrote that the structure of all great adventures is the Grail legend; the search for an answer to the question “what ails you?” – the one question in life that can never be answered through introspection.

The fact that sixty years later I chose the Potwell Inn as the name for my imaginary happy place, should be an awful warning to parents, teachers and economists about the power of stories. But there’s another thread that animates all great stories and that’s threat and release. Love is only truly love because it always ends in loss. Bereavement is the price we pay for flying, like Icarus, too close to the sun. If you look carefully at the sidebar you may notice the odd category “Uncle Jim” which I hardly ever use, but refers to the threat of annihilation by the large woman’s drunken brother. His threats are comical, but the menace is very real, and occasional confrontations (and dunkings in the river) only end with Uncle Jim’s accidental death wearing Polly’s jacket; relieving the unhappy Polly of his identity and allowing the new beginning he’d dreamed of.

So in one sense, the idea of the Potwell Inn as a safe place is only partially true. Which brings me back to the photograph. The canoeist in question is not paddling – as you might imagine – towards a magnificent sunset. The light floods across from the huge and mythically unlovely blocks of flats that were built on the old gasworks site across the river from us. Grossly overpriced, jerrybuilt monstrosities that resemble Russian bonded warehouses. The old gasworks site on what’s been named by an overheated copywriter as “The Western Riverside” was an ecological hotspot as well as providing a wide wildlife corridor towards a brief strip of countryside – awaiting ‘improvement’ from an ambitious architect with a couple of prisons under their belt. In my view that’s a crime that unites Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Binsey Poplars” with John Masefield’s “cheap tin trays”. [sorry – this is a rant so no prisoners!]

But the threat element of my story goes further because the Potwell Inn of my imagination is also bordered by the river on which my canoeist paddles; but this real river is carrying more than its share of human effluent – the telltale signs are the ice floes of detergent foam that signify that someone – in a treatment plant somewhere close – has dumped another load of shit into the vicinity of my safe place.

I worry that my frequently elegiac rendering of the Potwell Inn distracts from the reality that Uncle Jim, who regenerates more often than Doctor Who, currently wears an expensive suit and loves to entertain Councillors and Planning officials at party conferences : – ( it’s all in the declarations of interest so no-one need bother denying it).

It’s too much – sometimes – this sense of threat. One of my producers once said that my best writing was in the lyrical style. Well yes – but the lyricism of mine and much current nature writing is in danger of becoming politically useful greenwashing. When was the last time I heard a cuckoo? In North Wales last week we were both startled with joy at the sound of a cuckoo which turned out to be no more lyrical than the dishwasher doing its rhythmic thing. The last real cuckoo was probably five years ago on our friends smallholding on the Brecon Beacons. How long will it be before we forget altogether?

On the other hand I’m having a bit of a fern binge at the moment and we found loads of Wall Rue on the wall outside the flat. How ironic that in my previous post I wrote about the way the plants and insects will outlive us when the catastrophe finally happens. Today I’m thinking how unutterably sad it will be if the only witnesses of the unfolding tragedy are dead?

Uncle Jim drops by

The shed – damaged by vandals two years ago

Our hearts sank when a post on the allotment group Facebook page alerted us to the fact that once again we’d had intruders on the site who had broken into about 15 sheds. Luckily, this time we had escaped their attention. It’s impossible to overstate how insecure this made us feel. Theft and vandalism are almost universal on allotment sites and the emotional damage is enormous. There’s a huge difference between a garden and an allotment plot because your garden is usually attached to, and part of your home – whereas an allotment is often several miles away and also open to all comers. It’s almost impossible to insure your tools for that reason, and of course vandalism and theft of crops puts your plans back by a whole season.

A couple of nights ago I couldn’t sleep. My mind was churning over some big issues when I had a flash of inspiration about one aspect of the Potwell Inn that I’d never really articulated. The reasoning behind the name of this fictitious place comes from the HG Wells novel “A History of Mr Polly” and the campervan is called Polly for that reason. I first read the novel as an English set book when I was at school. I’d reached that awkward stage in life – my early teens – when nothing seemed to work. Nothing fitted or suited me and I felt bolshy and shy in equal measure. Most of my teachers had fought in the war and their various traumas were all too apparent – often rude, domineering and gimlet eyed when it came to any deviation from the straight and narrow of a lesson plan that could never ever accommodate my restless mind. There were exceptions of course. Bill Williams could make maths into an intellectual adventure; Chris Levinson introduced me to modern American poetry and literature. Whacker Allan, notwithstanding his considerable and violent canings never dimmed my determination to get to France; but Punch Neesham thought that a headlock was the best way to facilitate the removal of a sweet from a fourteen year old’s mouth. So reading “Polly” was a bit of a revelation to me – offering an escape route from all that. I didn’t identify with Polly, because for a while I became him. I wanted to fall in love – anyone would do. I wanted to clown around and, if need be, burn down the crippling suburban prison in which I felt trapped.

When eventually aged 17 I was escorted out of school by the scruff of the neck by a Headmaster who had a great deal to be modest about, it felt like a kind of liberation. Whatever crap I found myself wading through, I knew that it was my crap; my choice and I could endure it because the alternative was to fall into a pit of mediocrity in which you were promoted for not threatening the system.

The thought of finding or creating my own version of the Potwell Inn never left me. Sometimes it came to me as a kind of vision – like the memory of drinking a pint of Exmoor Gold leaning on the sea wall outside the Griffin at Dale. If ever anyone saw my eyes drifting away during times of particular hardship it was because I’d have taken a temporary absence in my mind. Back to the pub and the sea. Once I’d got together with Madame – I was 18 and she was only 15 – we were able to break away and create the first of many iterations of the Potwell Inn together.

But there was always Uncle Jim to contend with. In the novel he’s the landlady of the Potwell Inn (AKA the plump woman’s) nephew. He’s a violent drunk who believes he has been cheated of his inheritance – the pub – and occasionally turns up in the midst of their little paradise threatening terrible things. In our own lives there were lots of Uncle Jims and you never knew when, or in what disguise, they were going to turn up; often in the form of someone claiming to want to help, and especially as people who thought my whole purpose as a parish priest was to do exactly what they required of me and act as some kind of chaplain to their mysterious status quo.

My restless night suddenly reminded me that that Potwell Inn – that’s to say this particular version of it – is a very precious and visionary place that somehow overlaps our real lives and sometimes for a few hours or even days actually becomes our real lives. Most of the time, living in the centre of the city where in winter the sun really does set over the needle exchange we need the Potwell Inn to help us recover. In our souls we take it everywhere, especially in Polly the campervan.

Today, across the Green, the river is running higher than we’ve ever seen over the past seven years. The riverside paths are covered by up to a couple of feet of muddy water travelling faster than I could run, and Pulteney Weir has all but disappeared. We’ve had drought and record summer temperatures, a vicious cold spell, unduly warm winter weather and now days and days of heavy rain. We’re at a bit of a loss to decide what to grow next year because this global climate catastrophe is galloping up on us. A less than divine visitation by an all too humanly created Uncle Jim. And suddenly the Potwell Inn takes on a whole new dimension and becomes a kind of Ark.

December 2020 – this year the water is two rails higher.