Tag: AI

I really should stop writing about Cornwall.

The tin tabernacle in Cadgwith

Another wet day in Cornwall – in Camborne they’ve exceeded the biblical flood by exceeding 40 consecutive days of rain. It hasn’t been a huge problem for us down at the southernmost tip except for the lanes – there’s only one really main road and the rest are pretty much lanes anyway and they are running with water; some right across and others at both edges but all the puddles are sheltering murderous suspension wrecking potholes. If anyone’s got a spare billion pounds we could do with some of it down here.

Anyway, the upshot of the long days confined to our rented cottage on the top of a cliff is that Madame has been doing a lot of internet surfing, and today she typed in my name into Gemini and discovered that I am the landlord of a pub in Helston whose wife was once a police dog-handler but who has sadly died. In fact, according to the infallible AI, several pubs in the neighbourhood are claiming that I am their landlord – which prompted me to ask her whether it would be OK to pop down to the Five Pilchards to see my virtual wife. Madame was not amused. Much as I love Google Gemini, it makes more false connections than a village gossip, and bigamy is still a crime.

Sadly spring has not sprung nearly as much as we’d hoped so neither the plant hunting nor the moth trapping have taken up much of our time and among other things – like writing this blog – we’ve been binge watching the old DVD’s we brought down. John Schlesinger’s “Cold Comfort Farm” is one of the funniest films ever, and Ian McKellen’s sermon to the Quivering Brethren as Amos Starkadder is an act of sheer joy. I’ve even (naughtily) started sermons myself once or twice with the words “ye’re all damned”; not forgetting to grip the edge of the pulpit and stare at the congregation with sheer malevolence for fifteen seconds. But we also watched Alec Guinness’s superb performance as George Smiley in John Le Carré’s Karla trilogy. The two BBC series miss out the middle book. It was a treat, and an acting seminar, to watch Alec Guinness playing such a morally complex character. The very last words that Smiley speaks as Karla is led away, when someone says “George you’ve won” and he replies “I suppose I have” made me wish I could hug him. It was so brilliantly done; the way he managed to express the sadness and loss of winning his epic battle.

All that ambiguity sent me straight back to yesterday’s post with the thought that I’d missed an important aspect of flourishing even though I did say that it’s by no means a primrose path. When, back in the day, I talked to parents about christening, I would often find that they had an odd idea that we believed that babies are born bad and needed to be made good by baptism. Something about washing away sins had taken root in the collective understanding. Frankly I think that’s a horrible idea, but even horrible ideas deserve a bit of thought. I talked yesterday about cultivating virtuous habits – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage; but I didn’t offer any idea of what the starting point might be. The idea that we’re born bad and need to be made good which I described as horrible would be one place (but totally wrong I think). On the other hand I’d find it difficult to say that we’re born perfect at the top of a greasy pole of corruption because that’s equally far fetched and nasty. So what about a working definition of what we might call the human condition which pitches us somewhere near the middle point that Aristotle was so keen for us to maintain. Then we say that we can move up or down the scale by way of good or bad habits.

Each of the four or perhaps fifteen virtues which can, in combination lead us towards flourishing and fulfilment have their counterparts which can lead us in the opposite direction; unhappiness and suffering. As an example I could mention affairs. We’re all much of a muchness in the sexual attraction stakes; many of us have primary commitments but that doesn’t stop us from meeting others that we find attractive. In a very long career of helping people through crises of their own making, one factor comes to the surface almost every time. We rarely get ourselves into trouble in one giant act of folly. We do it step by tiny step and then one day it’s too late. The same goes for any kind of addiction; food, alcohol, drugs, erotic fantasies, fraud, thieving, field botany or hoarding rubbish. Thankfully I’m not a counsellor so you needn’t worry that I’m about to offer advice but I’ll just quote a line from an ee cummings poem –

where’s too far said he

where you are said she

Notice also that I haven’t mentioned any divine punishments or rewards. That’s because I don’t believe in them. None of the purported torments of hell can measure up to the guilt and shame brought upon us by our own perversity, although there are many occasions when I wish that Danté’s circles of hell which included special places for bishops, princes, corrupt politicians and not forgetting people who didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Occasionally I really wish that could be true. But there are always some wicked people who seem to get away with it. On the other hand I’ve sat with some horrible people who – as they lay dying – seemed to be suffering terrible agonies of remorse. Too late!

Conversely I think that the idea we should punish ourselves and live shadow lives in order to achieve the extremely notional rewards of heaven is also wicked. The way we live our lives can’t or shouldn’t be reduced to the spreadsheets and calculus of rulebooks. Is there anything wrong with muddling along and trying very hard to learn from your mistakes?

Looking out to sea in a gale from Kynance Cove café towards Lizard point. Hot chocolate – heaven; rocks – hell.

On plants and parasites

For the most part, over the years, I’ve seen New Year more as a celebration that the old year is over and done with and that January 1st is no more than a blank canvas. But this time it was different because 2025 was pretty rubbish, what with innumerable health problems and having to spend a fortune getting the campervan fixed. By the end of the year the health problems along with the van repairs were largely sorted and we were free to resume our itinerant lives; gardening, exploring and recording wildlife and camping unencumbered by worries. It was an exhilarating feeling to be set free to imagine once again. The three resolutions of last year were largely fulfilled and I lay awake making excited plans for 2026.

So after the most optimistic start to 2026, I had a sudden attack of dust and ashes, partially caused by this plant. It’s called Greater Dodder and it was growing so inconspicuously down by the river I would probably never have noticed it. Fortunately the leader of the BSBI New Year plant hunt that we were on, clocked it and we all gathered around to see a very unusual (RR in the books) plant. We’ve seen its much more common relative in Pembrokeshire and North Wales but it was a lovely surprise to see it growing on our local patch. It’s a parasitic plant, related to bindweed (gardeners feel free to hiss) and this one grows especially on nettles.

However the excitement was followed almost straight away by the sense of disappointment that I hadn’t found it for myself. Anyway I photographed it and when we got home looked it up in the books and discovered that it’s been here near the river in Bath for a few years at least and that it prefers growing near water. In fact – to borrow a term from the police procedurals on the telly – it’s got form – a great reminder that the more you know about wildlife preferences the more likely you are to find what you’re looking for.

And so the roller coaster in my brain continued for a while as I pondered how to record it – and as spring follows winter the idea dropped into my mind that it would be a good idea to extend my database to include all the other things we find on our walks; birds, fungi, insects, ferns, slime moulds ( a recent obsession) and lepidoptera because we’ve now got a portable moth trap that won’t take up too much space in the campervan.

It sounds so easy doesn’t it? extend the database which lives in a spreadsheet file so that instead of having to open separate files for each interest, it all sits on one very large spreadsheet so I could, for example, look at everything we found on a certain day, or everything we’ve ever found in a certain place; I could assemble lists for every purpose and even draw pie charts. I was (temporarily) on fire at the possibility of using AI to do all the heavy lifting and slept very badly, basking in the excitement and imagining fine days in Cornwall walking down to Percuil, looking for orchids and listening to the Curlews calling on the mud flats; or in the Bannau Brycheiniog watching the mist below in the valleys or in North Wales feasting on wild mushrooms and watching gannets dive bombing the sea.

That lasted as long as it took to sit in front of the computer and figure out how to do it. My grasp of spreadsheets and how to manipulate them is minimal to non-existent. I am at the sub-beginner level – I just make lists – so I started slowly by finding out that a tab on a spreadsheet is not the same as a tab on a beer can or the one on an ancient typewriter and I set up a new tab (page) marked fungi and tried to copy and paste my list of fungi into the newly named “Biological Records” spreadsheet – oooh posh! – where it promptly fragmented and after a bit of blokey random key pressing disappeared altogether. A frantic reverse ferret move revived the patient but everything was in the wrong columns. It dawned on me that I was in for an agonising long haul – studying things that I really don’t like in order to study better the things that interest me most. No pixie dust, just slog and brain fog like learning to solve differential equations in school.

Dodder – Cousin Bronwyn from West Wales beasting the Gorse.

Self doubt closely resembles Dodder and its cousin in the photo at the top, Lesser Dodder. It coils around your brain and sucks it dry; replacing the creative juices with dust. Like Restharrow – a different tangle of a plant that does what it says on the tin and stops a horse-drawn harrow in its tracks. It’s the curse of all self-taught people to defer instinctively to the careless wisdom of those who had an academic career in gnats’ navels and who believe their qualifications trump the more common muddy boots kind of knowledge gained by the hoi polloi. [That should properly read ….. ‘gained by hoi polloi’ because hoi is the definite article in Greek, but if I wrote it that way I’d be denounced as a pedant]. And so we, the great unwashed, struggle with the pronunciation of long binomial names like Pseudoperonospora humuli and remain silent rather than have a go at it. The trick is to put the stress on the third syllable before the last and say it with conviction. The political theorist and philosopher Gramsci called people like us “organic intellectuals”. It’s a term I’m proud to embrace because it puts me in the company of the miners and railway workers, the millers and machinists and labourers who taught themselves to the highest levels and founded institutes and even invented the health services, ambulance clubs, cooperatives and friendly societies that protected their communities from hardship and exploitation by hard-nosed industrialists, the parasitic human subspecies of Dodder.

After a couple of hours trying to get my head around the entirely unfamiliar vocabulary of computer spreadsheets I didn’t just feel depressed, I felt stupid. I’d still got a mountain of identifications to do with no prospect of getting everything done before the new season kicks off in earnest. But then Madame suggested a walk and that lifted the mood. It’s been very cold with icy winds for days, but there’s been abundant sunshine and we’ve had some lovely walks along the river. Slowly the precious feeling of optimism and hope warmed our fingers and toes and we began to talk about journeys waiting to be made. I will get the spreadsheet working, write my million words and we will make our planned travels around the galleries and churches of Wales to see the cruelly unacknowledged glories of Welsh art. We will hunt for birds and plants, moths and butterflies as if we were in the Amazon jungle, and we’ll dip our feet in the sea again like we did when we were teenagers in awe of the turquoise sea and dracaenas of Falmouth.

Too old for that sort of malarkey? My dears, you have no idea!

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

The asparagus season gets underway

It’s ironic, really , that we dug up the asparagus bed on the Potwell Inn allotment pretty much on the first day of the official season. I’ve already written about its lack of productivity and in the end borrowed time has run out. Ours was barely 10′ x 5′ but we were down at the Lost Gardens of Heligan a couple of years ago and they had lost a very long bed. For reasons unknown to us, these beds will suddenly turn their faces to the wall and there’s nothing to be done about it. Luckily, there is a Worcester business run by the Chinn family who grow the most fabulous English asparagus no more than 50 miles from Bath. The long plane journey from Peru or wherever else is not just polluting, the flavour really deteriorates and if you, like us, can no longer grow your own it’s really worthwhile getting your hands on the local product. Then you need to make Hollandaise sauce, or at least learn to make it because again the commercial supermarket version is overloaded with chemicals and stabilizers. There’s a reason for that, because the sauce splits very easily – made properly it’s like hot mayonnaise with butter beaten into the egg yolks instead of oil. Life threateningly good for just a brief few weeks of the year; certainly not a dish to eat too often! Traditionally you add a teaspoon of Tarragon Vinegar (very easy to make your own) to the eggs at the beginning and that very faint perfume really brightens the whole dish. Our youngest son used to prep the Hollandaise by the gallon in one restaurant he worked in.

The downside to asparagus depends on your DNA because it makes your urine smell dreadfully sulphurous regardless; but only some of us can actually smell it. Like being able to curl your tongue, the rich odour of asparagus wee is a genetic gift. We had an old friend who was a member of a London club and who swore that there was a notice on the wall, begging members “not to piss in the umbrella stands during the asparagus season”. Oh how they live, the powerful! Anyway the Potwell Inn allows no misbehaviour of that sort, you’ll be pleased to know.

Actually asparagus is marvellous steamed just on its own with a dollop of butter and/or a curl of parmesan; but on high days and holidays we serve it as “Délices d’Argenteuil” in a recipe by Simon Hopkinson – you can find it online and it’s a bit of a faff but very grand as well. The combination of pancakes, Parma ham, Hollandaise and English asparagus is lovely. Then there’s the flan which Madame loves and finally the BBQ. With those four ways of cooking it and a season that lasts not much more than six to eight weeks, you’ll never get bored.

Alas, much of my time has been spent on the computer when it rains. My research into AI is very slowly gaining ground and it’s almost scarily efficient at doing those boring repetitive jobs that I so dislike. Whether or not it’s a threat to life and civilisation is almost irrelevant because Pandora’s box is open and bad actors can always find a way of exploiting new discoveries for personal gain. Our best defence is to understand the technology and use it enough to recognise the dangers when (as they inevitably will) – they emerge.

An update on the asparagus flan

24 hours later, having scoffed half of the flan for supper I feel I should report on a completely unexpected outcome. Somehow I forgot to start the timer when the flan went into the oven complete with its filling, so when I realized my mistake I had to finish cooking it by eye and instinct. Flans are simple enough to cook, and I really enjoy making them but over the years I’ve discovered that they can go from bloom to blown in two minutes. I’ve also, thinking back on it, fallen into the habit of going for a firm set of the custard which is always useful if the flan is for a picnic and going to be carried around in a box; and of course if you’re baking 20,000 a day in a factory. However, yesterday I had to make a decision without benefit of the clock, so as the top began to take a bit of colour I fetched it out of the oven and put it aside to cool. When it came time to eat it we discovered that the usual firm set middle was still a bit runny, faintly but not oppressively cheesy, unctuous and smooth; like home-made custard. The combination of crisp pastry, firm and very fresh asparagus and the unctuous sauce was absolutely lovely – an accidental discovery made in heaven. I’ve made up my mind to make a cauliflower cheese, not sauced as usual with a cheesy bechamel, but with a cream, eggs and cheese custard. Then we’ll see whether happy accidents can be turned into enjoyable insights.