Tag: autumn

A little outdoor therapy goes a long way.

Regulars won’t need reminding that I find autumn difficult. Melancholia would be easy to dismiss as a middle class hybrid of self-pity and dark nights; feedstock for bad poems and self-help Guardian articles. It isn’t the same thing as depression – which is an illness you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. I suggest that melancholia is an attempt at a constructive relationship with the sadness that goes with shrinking days, cold, rain and the senescence of nature. In October and November I often feel that the allotment, instead of being a rewarding and inspiring place is a place where mockery reigns. Where overwintering thugweeds overwhelm the earth in order to gain a destructive head start in spring. The place of serenity, beauty and hope in Spring and early summer, grows old and dies back. Then a pause – the gap between the outbreathing of autumn and the inbreathing that powers early spring; the pause where we stand beside the beds and wonder – is that it? – will the sun ever return?

The green bag contains two fleeces for lining the hanging strawberry baskets.

Late autumn and early winter are the times when gardening becomes a test of will – for me at least. Madame is unaffected by all this; she just gets on with it and enjoys every moment and simply doesn’t understand what’s going on with me. So we haggle and negotiate an hour or two here and there and I clear one bed at a time and focus entirely on each limited job – excluding any thoughts of the mountain of other things that need to be done. And amazingly, I always feel better. Close up, I see the spring buds already there on the fruit trees. Each bucket full of the gut-like roots of bindweed removed from a patch of ground represents a tiny victory against the promiscuity of nature. I’ve now almost finished digging over the beds in the polytunnel ready to plant out and sow for the winter. The mood of the month is stolid resistance; spring song will follow.

Even more amazingly, my arthritic joints begin to unlock with the exercise – the bending and stretching and reaching across, the 50 yard and very uneven path to the top of the site feels less steep after a week or two of stopping to catch my breath. I can lift heavy bags of compost and enjoy the complex geometry of muscles and bone. My mood lifts and I catch myself gazing at the drifts of leaves scuttering down in a wind that even drowns out the traffic: gold and yellow and scarlet and brown. Who knows how this change happens? I think of the trees in their complex relationships with the soil and the fungi which we barely suspected thirty years ago and wonder what unsuspected relationships exist between the natural world and our own health. The arrogance of our modern materialistic worldview overlays millions of years of evolutionary history which our whole being expresses in the miraculous workings of our minds and bodies. Sourdough bread and live yoghurt don’t even begin to explain human flourishing.

So here’s the deal. I can’t thrive on a monoculture of allotmenteering; I also need texture in my life – time to think, time to walk, time to read and time to relax and do nothing. I need other subjects to focus my interests – field botany and fungus hunting for instance – both of them offer formidable intellectual challenges. This afternoon, for instance, Madame asked if I could identify a bag of seeds saved off the allotment. At first glance this is an insoluble problem, but knowing where to look made it absurdly simple. I didn’t know the answer but I knew where I could find it and bingo! it was Angelica – easily identified from the firework burst of its dead seed head and a quick look at the seeds. The Carrot family may all look the same in a field, but you don’t have to be particularly brilliant to tell them apart – just organised and systematic.

Speaking of which, I’ve just bought the first volume of Geoffrey Kibby’s marvellous “Mushrooms and Toadstools of Britain and Europe”. There are three more volumes – so I’m going to have to save up; but this is everything you could wish for in a textbook. It’s far too big and heavy to fit in your pocket, so it’s a reference book. I’m not remotely qualified to comment on its scientific status – plenty of reviewers have done that and it’s definitely a five star purchase. The descriptions and the pictures – all hand painted by the author – are lovely. But what strikes me most is what a good teacher he is. Mycology can be awfully obscure and a bit sniffy at times, but this series manages to be completely thorough without being in the least intimidating. Like all the best teachers he knows that there are challenging conceptual difficulties to overcome but he gives a reader like me – who needs a permanent bookmark in the glossary section – the confidence to think that even I could surmount them with a bit of cheerful energy. There’s hardly a page where I think – Oh I couldn’t do that! The really great experts don’t wear their expertise on their sleeve.

I think this is Laccaria amethystina – Amethyst Deceiver; but I know it’s beautiful. Found near Brecon last year.

This is what happens when we try to live in one room!

My temporary workspace

We’ve been paying a great deal of attention to our electricity bills as the winter advances on us. The Government’s Panglossian approach towards other people’s hardships has meant that we’ve turned the central heating off in all but one of the rooms in our flat because not withstanding the unstinting generosity of the press releases, our bills have always been higher that the so called averages quoted by them. Sadly we’ve been twinned with a steelworks for the purposes of averaging out the bill. The fight against black mould is continuing in spite of repeated appeals to our landlord – the Church of England Pensions Board if you’re interested – whose rent increase this year pretty much swallowed up their pension increase. “Well, we all have to do our bit” we say through gritted teeth.

So what to do? The allotment is one way of getting warm. Clearing the beds of last year’s crops and weeds is excellent exercise that apparently rivals wearing lycra for fending off heart attacks. There are just a couple of beds left to clear but this week we turned to the polytunnel because that will be the first area to be planted up. First we clear all the plants, and in normal years that would be the end of it but this year the encroachment of bindweed means that it needs digging. In a perfect world we’d be committed no-diggers, but the Potwell Inn has to make do with living in the real world in which bindweed – if it’s not controlled – will choke out almost any plant, however vigorous. The thick, 2mm diameter rhizomes, can spread amazingly quickly and even the smallest broken bits, left in the ground, can regenerate. Our second – only slightly lesser problem is couch grass which invades every year from the neglected plots next to ours. Then there’s the green mould that gradually builds up on the greenhouse and the polytunnel. We scrub it off with an organic product called Citrox which has an immediate beneficial effect on the light transmission. Yes, most days – if it’s not raining too hard – we spend a few hours up at the allotment keeping warm and fit. Then most days we come home and fall asleep for half an hour. For some obscure reason I’ve always loved digging, so even if it’s only a few selected beds it’s a joy only slightly tempered by protesting joints and muscles.

But the mess on the dining table tells another story. Back in the day when I was writing radio scripts, it would take roughly an hour to write a minute’s worth of broadcastable material. Sermons took the same amount of time when I wrote them out in full; but over time I learned to work firstly with notes and then eventually I could ad lib after a good deal of study and practice. Always, though, a very slow process. The dining table library is all about identifying the things we’ve found whilst out walking. The fungus season has reached its peak a little late this year due to the weather, but being relatively new to fungi it seems to take an eternity to identify them fully. Why it should be that there’s so much intellectual satisfaction from identifying the LBJ’s (little brown jobs) is a task for a psychologist probably; but I love the challenge, and going out with friends looking for fungi is even more fun.

Then of course there’s writing this blog and cooking meals for ourselves and occasional family members and shopping, oh and meetings, drinking coffee, eating too many biscuits and watching the telly (except for news programmes which upset me). On the best days Madame and I share the table and I write while she draws at the other end. As you see in the photograph, I may have encroached on her territory.

I suppose when spring comes and the weather warms up we’ll move back into our respective workspaces but for now – although you might imagine we’ve had a row as we work in silence – the arrangement suits us both. The only loser is the electricity company – well tough!

One last fungus hunt – perhaps?

The gardens and lake at Stourhead

As autumn advances towards winter the fungal glory days gradually begin to dwindle and those ground dwellers that are left are often difficult to find amongst a thick carpet of leaves. The Bath Nats field meeting at Stourhead was billed as a general walk around with the prospect of seeing tree sparrows thrown in as a teaser. I like my quarry to sit still so I’m not much of a birder – feeling totally demoralized when someone names a brown blob flying away fast at 150 yards without even lifting up their £2000 Swarkovski binoculars. No mention of jizz encourages me that I’ll ever get there, although I did have a magic moment yesterday when I spotted a Marmalade Hoverfly and just knew what it was.

Tree Sparrows are something of a rarity around here I’ve been told, and a quick look at a local guide to Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire birding doesn’t even mention them. So off we went with our binoculars to Stourhead along with a group of Bath Nats members with a reassuringly wide range of interests.

And so, after presenting our National Trust membership cards we set off in pursuit of the group, directed by the staff on the entrance to turn off onto an anonymous looking footpath before we got to the places that most visitors go to look at. After a 50 yard yomp uphill through the mud we found our group in a characteristic fungal hunt position – backs bent and eyes firmly on the ground.

Now here’s the surprising bit of our day out. From the outset, Madame with her keen eye was spotting the fungi – amongst the fallen leaves, on bits of fallen dead wood and later on the stacks of cordwood left behind by foresters. For the most part they were tiny. The biggest things we saw were a couple of Dryad’s Saddles – Polyporus squamosus that had fallen off their dead host and lay rotting on the ground. One of our companions said that they stink like rotten fish and unable to resist the challenge I picked one up and gave it a sniff. It wasn’t exactly fishy but it did smell rotten and felt like soft flenched whale blubber in my hands. Later we saw a ring of Shaggy Parasols – Chlorophyllum rhacodes, but beyond that pretty well everything we found was in the 1-2 cm range. Of course these are precisely the road less travelled in fungus hunting, and it was immensely rewarding to find such lovely but tiny species. Here they are, and there’s a photocall at the end of this post.

Helvella lacunosa, Elfin Saddle,
Helvella crispa, White Saddle,
Ramariopsis kunzei, Ivory Coral,
Mycena rosea, Rosy Bonnet
Crepidotus epibyrus,
Xylaria hypoxylon, Candlesnuff Fungus,
Trametes versicolour, Turkey Tail,
Schizophyllum commune, Splitgill,
Stereum hirsutum, Hairy Curtain Crust,
Bulgaria inquinans, Black Bulgar,
Flammulina velutipes, Velvet Shank,
Chlorophyllum rhacodes, Shaggy Parasol,

So all in all it was an unexpectedly joyful and accidental fungus foray.

Since our leader was a volunteer with local knowledge, the Tree Sparrows turned out to be something of a done deal; tucked away at a feeding station and nest boxes that you’d never find if you weren’t taken there, but there we are; I can barely tell a House Sparrow from a Dunnock except for the wonderful tuneless chirp of the House Sparrow that fills me with memories of my childhood home.

This morning Madame and I sat in bed with my laptop and the books heaped in the middle and identified the fungi as best we could. Who says that romance is dead? – but please don’t take these photos as definitive. Some of them could be very wrong, but we did our best.

Later we walked around the lake, and by the time we reached the iron bridge it was dusk and Madame spotted something that looked like a Swallow skimming across the water. It was a Daubenton’s bat – an almost triumphal ending to a lovely day. By the time we reached the entrance it was almost dark.

We dream of these days

A Harvest Moon rising behind the campsite last night

There’s a particular combination of pale blue autumn sky and thin cloud that for me, encodes in a glimpse what would take an eternity of thought to express. As if a haiku could be condensed into a single syllable. I call it China Blue – I’ve no idea why – but that name seems to work for me; possibly something to do with early Chinese ceramics, when the cobalt for blue had to be pounded from the ore, impurities and all .

I can however name some of the associations with this particular sky. I think of wetlands; the thrilling call of a curlew; of rusting corrugated iron barns, of rhynes (a local name for drainage ditches). I think of sunny days and cool evenings and the sound of the wind in the drying grasses, and long T shirt walks; field mushrooms; ripe apples and slightly drunken conversations in the dusk. Such days are days of grace and can’t be planned – you just have to grab them as if your life depended on it, which of course it does.

When we came here to St David’s the weather forecast was for two weeks of non-stop rain, and we weren’t expecting too much – some reading, a little writing and then lots of sleep. However there is what we have learned to call the peninsula effect – probably unknown to any respectable scientist, but encouraged by fifty years of camping trips to different west facing peninsulas from Lizard in Cornwall to Ravenglass in Cumbria. On a significant number of occasions, the forecast of rain was fulfilled several miles inland leaving us in dry and even sunny weather. This theory is entirely without foundation so always take your raincoat and remember that we, as avid allotmenteers , read weather forecasts like you might read the Racing Times; being prepared to gamble.

Yesterday, however, the weather forecast promised a day’s respite between two dwindling Atlantic storms and we woke up to a change in wind direction and warm sunshine. A perfect China Blue day. And so we decided to walk out of the back of the campsite across to Lower Treginnis Farm – home to one of three Farms for City Children and on down to Porthlysgi beach. It’s not a long walk, but it’s near to one of our favourite mushroom foraging spots whose exact location is a secret!

It’s a great walk because you walk from the campsite into an extremely well run organic mixed farm run by a young Welsh couple who are happy to talk about what they’re up to. We had walked the track the previous day and noticed that the straw stubble from a previous crop was longer than it would normally be. “I wonder if they’re going to direct drill it?” – I said to Madame. Contrary to received wisdom about perfidious farmers ruining the soil and polluting the atmosphere; an increasing number are way ahead of the game; organic, no-dig, low impact mixed farming. Those of us who are trying to change the way we spend on food towards local and sustainable foodstuffs really need local farms such as this to make it work. I know George Monbiot would disagree vehemently but I don’t think he realizes that his campaign to cover much of the uplands and marginal land with trees, and turn the entire population into vegans would induce even bigger environmental and cultural destruction; destroying whole landscapes and playing into the hands of the industrial food producers. The industrial farming of trees has the same adverse effects on biodiversity as the industrial farming of cattle.

Anyway, when we returned from mushrooming we found our two farmers direct drilling a grass seed mixture into the stubble. In the surrounding fields we found all the Clover and normal weeds that would be destroyed by spraying, but in addition there was a good deal of Plantain, Sorrel and Chicory which must surely have been part of the mixture. Chicory, having a long tap root, is very drought resistant and so is Plantain. Commercial varieties of these (no longer) wild plants are increasing drought resistance and increasing weight gain and milk yields on experimental farms in New Zealand because they’re very *palatable to cattle and sheep.

This year’s lambs looked in fine shape, enjoying the pasture which has been revived by plentiful rain. Nearer the coast on the same farm last year we spotted a small flock of what might have been Katahdin sheep, developed in the United States. I couldn’t be sure of the breed but they are apparently easy to manage hair coated sheep (so don’t need shearing), hardy, with high fertility and strong flocking instinct. In a farming environment where margins are low, labour expensive and wool not worth selling, they seem like a perfect breed. Those of us who are depressed by climate destruction and the apparent lack of government action have a kind of duty to read about and support the many non intensive, non polluting and carbon reducing regimes that are being trialled in farms like this one around the country. Good luck to them!

After our farm diversion we pressed on towards the beach, picking a breakfast’s worth of wild mushrooms in a place we’d never before found them, and then alongside a stream down to Porthlysgi beach. It’s usually quiet there but the fine weather and the autumn flush of coast path walkers had turned it into a busy highway. We bagged an available spot away from the crumbling cliff and sunbathed uncomfortably for half an hour, but there was a walking tour guide with a large party noisily occupying half the beach and we decided to wander back to the van.

As we left the beach we noticed a small cairn which had been attracting a good deal of attention from passers by and especially from dogs. We went to see the cause of the excitement and were distressed to see a dead Gannet, roughly covered with pebbles and presumably a victim of H5N1 bird flu which has hammered the local breeding colonies, and originated – wouldn’t you know – in intensive chicken farms in Asia. I couldn’t get the sight of that powerful beak and the sightless eyes out of my mind. One of the treats of the beach is (was?) to watch the Gannets lasering almost vertically down at huge speed after fish. By all accounts many other breeds have been affected – we usually hear the Manx Shearwaters coming in at dusk, but none this year – perhaps they flew home earlier. So once again the culprit is not so much farming as highly intensive farming.

I spent the night dreaming miserably about the fate of the Gannet. I can’t think of any logical reason why I should be so upset, and yet a strong connection with the bird and its fate seems inescapable, not just by losing the aesthetic joy of watching them hunt but something more like a bereavement – as if a bit of me had died with the bird. The question – “How could a bird relate to me?” and its converse “How should I relate to a bird?” – turns out to be far more challenging than I ever imagined, but answering it lies at the heart of the present environmental and ecological crisis. Excluding the sentimental, the extractive and the passive relationships with nature on general offer leaves something that looks a bit metaphysical. The learned doctors of the Christian church decided centuries ago that animals cannot have souls and they probably never gave a moment’s thought to whether trees, rocks, plants or landscapes could. The modern age in the west brought many benefits to us but it smuggled an instrumental relationship with nature into the culture that spread like an evil miasma into every aspect of our lives. The Taoists on the other hand forged an attractive and non-theistic faith based on the deep relationship between all animate and inanimate nature. But that’s a “Peering over the wall” view of another faith. I’m drawn to Robin Wall Kimmerer and her exploration of the contribution that First Nation Indian traditions could bring to ecology. I’m also drawn to that meditative tradition within Christianity represented by St John, St Francis, Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen among others. The way forward if we really want to save the earth and her inhabitants from destruction is to give all faiths a place at the table and not hand it over entirely to science, industry and unregenerate economists.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” –

Albert Einstein

*I was always advised not to try to use sheep to cut the grass in my churchyards because “they always ate the flowers first”

A very wet day in the campervan

“It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;”

Gerard Manley Hopkins – from “God’s Grandeur.”

Bath looked exceptionally beautiful today. The long slow decline of summer vitality in the trees and plants finally issues in this great finale as the last of the lifegiving sugars are drawn down to winter roots, and the brief days of impressionistic colour give way to winter sculpture. It feels like a kind of relief; like standing at the graveside of the season, or perhaps better – a rowdy wake – after a long rage against the dying of the light. And that’s enough poetry for now!

On the allotment we watched the strange behaviour of three magpies who were working together to harass a rat that was beginning to look pretty rattled by the experience. It’s not something we’ve ever seen before and, dare I say? it was good to see that the ubiquitous rats have at least one predator species aside from foxes and cats. We also know that there are peregrines buzzards, kestrels and red kites occasionally in the locality but their quarry seems to be the (plentiful) pigeons for the peregrines, and smaller rodents for the rest. Our rats are absolute porkers, fed on the fat of the leftovers mistakenly put into compost heaps and the fallen grain from bird feeders.

Stuck in a southwesterly atlantic airflow, the skies have been bringing pulses of heavy rain all week and there have been floods across the country. Our son had to make a long detour to escape flooded roads after his half term holiday up in Snowdonia; and in up Cumbria two of the lakes have been temporarily joined into one by floodwater. A perfect metaphor for the beginning of the COP26 climate conference. It just doesn’t seem that the will is there at governmental level to address the threat properly – I hope I’m wrong but I fear for the worst.

After what seemed like a week of full-on cooking we took a break today and dropped in on Toppings – a local independent bookshop that’s just moved into a much larger premises that used to be the Friends Meeting House. In honour of the opening they were handing out glasses of free fizzy and while we could see no sign of what used to be a good natural history section, Madame found for me the newly published biography of an artist, John Craxton, who we were both interested in; and then when we got home I clicked on what’s been a five year search for a biography of John Minton that was only available secondhand at just under £300 – and found two copies going for £20. Christmas has come early! However we also dropped in at the farmers’ market in search of a particular cheddar cheese and drew a blank. The stallholder only appears infrequently, but whenever he does I buy a small piece of his locally made Cheddar cheese because the flavour reminds me so strongly of the way cheese used to taste in my childhood – you know, wrapped in cotton scrim the threads of which you sometimes had to peel off; rich and ripe like apples and autumn. Flavours are always difficult to describe but supermarket cheese tends, these days, to be awarded a number where one means you’d be better off eating the bag it came in, and five is so artificially fierce it takes the skin off the back of your throat. It’s not about strength at all, as far as I’m concerned, it’s about depth – which is very different and relates to all sorts of factors that could never be reproduced in a factory. Scientific cheesemakers are very clever, with their temperature, pH measurements, artificial rennet and atmospherically controlled warehouses; but there are so many other factors, and you’re reduced to using slippery terms like terroir that are commonly employed as a way of inflating the price. To quote Michael Pollan once again, “you are what you eat, eats” – and the depth of flavour of cheese relates to the grass that the source of the milk – be it cow, sheep or goat – is fed on; what season it is and whether the milk was taken in the evening, the morning or mixed together. One of the nicest goats cheeses I ever ate was while I was walking in the Aubrac Hills in France with my middle son, and we stopped off at the farmhouse where it was made. We ate it with a penknife surrounded by the sounds of the herd.

Not being a cheesemaker, and lacking the funds to taste everything I like the look of, I can’t say with any authority what constitutes good or bad except by using the ordinary everyday common senses that come with being human. No experts needed, just a few treasured memories and the willingness to trust your own judgement.

Seals, field mice and borlotti beans

Ripe borlotti on the allotment

The Chinese five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) have their equivalents in the seasons which are listed in the same sequence – spring, summer, long (otherwise known as late) summer, autumn and winter. We have the idea of an “Indian summer” which refers to exceptionally warm weather in late autumn, much later than this present month of September; but there is always, I think, a perceptible change around this time of the year between the harvesting of almost all the crops at the end of August, and the beginning of September, but before the onset of true autumn usually counted at the equinox. These are blessed and luminous days when the earth seems to be resting and soaking up the last of the sun’s warmth before the declining days with the onset of autumn and winter. These are the days when the blackberry and sloe and if we’re lucky – the field mushroom teach us that all food is a gift.

Today it’s been raining, but last week, away in the campervan in Pembrokeshire we were enjoying historically fine weather. Whether we call it long or late summer wthere is this turning point where we gather food; preserving and storing it to take us through the winter months. We harvest and process the last of the tomatoes, aubergines, peppers and melons and clear the polytunnel ready for the winter; and it takes on the mantle of a spiritual observance. 

The inflow and outflow of the earth’s energy that sustains us; the sun’s energy that – through the miracle of photosynthesis – we harvest as food; and the moon’s energy that drives the tides and the more subtle seasons. The Taoist concept of yin and yang; strength and weakness; forcefulness and yielding – is a far better way of understanding our place in nature. There’s a great deal to be learned about the spirituality of gardening as seen in this fundamental cycle of birth and death; growth, ripening and senescence. We’ve grown so addicted to our illusory power; our great polluting machines and our chemicals, that we almost believe that there is no problem that cannot be solved by technology. As Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) once wrote. “If we declare war on nature we declare war on ourselves.” Perhaps it’s expressed even more powerfully in Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao te Ching:

When man interferes with the Tao

the sky becomes filthy,

the earth becomes depleted,

the equilibrium crumbles,

creatures become extinct.

Lao-Tzu, Tao te Ching – part of chapter 39, translated by Stephen Mitchell.

This is a season of ingathering and inbreathing and  it feels appropriate that the Chinese season of late summer is associated with the earth – one of the Chinese five elements. On the allotment trail cam we found a short video of a field mouse swaying precariously at the top of one of our Calendulas in the middle of the night, greedily eating the seeds. There was something beautiful about its enormous eyes and ears; its lightness, clinging to the stalks, its vigilance and vulnerability to predators. I wouldn’t begrudge it a single seed.

Ramsey Island at sunset

Back in Pembrokeshire last week, times we could hear the tide in Ramsey Sound almost roaring through The Bitches, but as it approached the null points of ebb or flow there was a late summer moment where it flowed neither here nor there but just rested, waiting until the balance changed and began the whole cycle again. The seal cows were gathering to birth their pups on their secluded hauls at the bottom of the cliffs – out of the reach of humans.

Some years ago we were camping near Skomer Island during the puffin season, when a huge cruise liner drew close to the island and discharged a dozen high speed ribs from the side, like invading marines.  The birdwatchers swept in towards the island laden with binoculars and cameras, and within an hour had gone again. What do you call that kind of ecotourism if not dangerous and exploitative? What sort of good could ever come from this phony immersion in nature?

On Tuesday, as we walked the coast path, we spotted a grey seal cow, heavily pregnant, lolling in the sea, eying us curiously from a hundred feet below . She looked old – something about her grizzled muzzle was weatherbeaten and aged. We were sufficiently close, with the help of my binoculars, for her face to fill the lenses. She had huge black eyes and nostrils and was so profoundly different a lifeform that, putting away any anthropomorphic nonsense, we had little else in common except for being alive and being there in the same place watching one another. There was no part of her being that I could appropriate to my own experience – we were both equally deserving of our part of the web of nature and yet her aloof thusness was complete. Around her were several other seal cows and their pups.

Sadly the seals have become a tourist attraction and from where we were camping on the clifftop we could see one powerful boat after another, all loaded with visitors, pause their engines momentarily at the regulated distance for photographs to be taken, and then accelerate away leaving a double wake that agitated the calm water of the sound for minutes, before the next boatload arrived. 

However, aside from all the philosophical maunderings it will please the borlotti worshippers to know that we are about to harvest this year’s crop, which has gone well. Not so well in the three sisters experiment where rust and moth didn’t bother us as much as thieves breaking in to steal. Between the rats and the badger the sisters were nibbled, sat upon and starved of light – which goes to show that some horticultural ideas are very regionally specific. Luckily we hedged our bets and the individual sisters have all yielded a crop for the winter.

The allotment is looking uncharacteristically weedy and tatty now, but we don’t take it personally – it’s always like this at this time. The good news is that during last week’s hot spell the aubergines finally started to yield a late second flush. The real challenge is to remove the old and replant the new so that not so much as a square inch is left exposed to the winter wind and rain.

Buttering parsnips

I’ve never quite understood how fine words could fail to butter at least a couple of parsnips – as long, that is, as someone is paying you to write them. Sadly, though in my case nobody pays me to write anything and so the Potwell Inn parsnips are only ever buttered thanks to our extremely modest pensions. Still; what’s the price of a pat of butter against the pleasure of eating our own organic parsnips straight off the allotment.

Yes it’s parsnip time again; having seen off the last of the summer vegetables. Parsnips and all the other roots shuffle modestly to the front of the queue and surprise us as they do every year. I imagine you could (just about) eat them boiled with a knob of butter; or mashed with the aforementioned and a bit of pepper but for me the glory of the parsnips is roasted until they’re golden – in olive oil rather than butter which burns too easily. For even greater transports of delight (so long as you’re not a vegetarian) I’d roast them with carrots, squash, and possibly beetroot in the meat juices left in the pan while the joint is resting, but that, for us these days, is a very occasional extravagance (and all the more enjoyable for it). But really any which way is good, and with care and attention you can even achieve the chef’s holy grail and possibly mythical quality – balance. Balance, I think, is how you describe a perfect culinary chord in which (to carry on the musical analogy) neither the first violins or the horns are getting all their own way.

Parsnip soup is one of those dishes beloved of pub chefs with a limited budget, who want to honour local sourcing without lashing out on salt marsh lamb. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved by a bit of TLC. I’ve tasted some truly grim versions. Don’t rush it; get the best fresh ingredients and give it time. Parsnips, especially shop bought ones, can be a bit woody towards the end of the season; so preparation should include cutting out the woody cores, because however long you blitz the resulting soup for, it will still taste as if you dropped a corner of the kitchen table into the pan. Your guests will not be impressed as they pick the splinters from their teeth if you extol the rustic virtues of their lunch. And finally, don’t over season it – let it speak for itself – and give it a swirl of sage oil and a dollop of crème fraiche. There isn’t a better way of marking an otherwise dull day.

It’s mid October and the daylight hours are shortening dramatically. When the sun shines, the autumn colours of the leaves are wonderful; but on a day like today when it’s drizzling; the allotment stares back at us like an estranged teenager and the earth is cold. It’s hard to see beyond the moment if the rain’s running down your neck and even the grass has taken on the blue green hue that’s an autumn speciality. Any pause in the traffic and you can almost hear the slugs munching. So we drifted off to a garden centre to get supplies of potting compost, sand and fine grit for a new garlic bed which needs to be well drained. We could make our own potting compost, but if the lockdown goes on we’ll have run out by the busiest time in March.

If you think that my occasional forays into philosophy or poetry, environmental politics, or spirituality are unexpected or random, I’d have to push back a bit and say that being human – I mean really human – can’t be boiled down to cooking and eating parsnips (thank goodness) or, for that matter, growing them. The allotment and the kitchen are two of the most important spaces in the (imaginary) Potwell Inn; but only two of them. Neither the natural history of Bath nor the contents of the bookshelves or the paintings on the walls, finish crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. I couldn’t even begin to make a list of my favourite marks of humanness and neither would I dare to suggest that my list enjoyed any kind of privilege in the great order of things. But the unique and glorious bird’s nest of borrowings and learnings that furnish my/your/anyone’s inner life is a symphony, a work of art.

And on the wet days and the ones where nothing seems to go right, it helps to have that precious bird’s nest. Goodness knows I was fed up today – so fed up I started reading Rilke! What I wanted to say is that full humanity needs its stories and poems and pictures and perhaps above all, its spiritualities, songs and music. It’s only through these shared arts that good and bad can be held together in hope. So although fine words may butter no economic parsnips, they can raise two fingers to the gods of chaos, war and destruction. And without those internal resources, there’s no symphony, no texture; just a solitary busker with a hat full of rain.

At last, some sea.

Back on Lleyn after almost a year of pining. We were up at 5.00am but despite all our preparations we didn’t actually get away until 9.30 laden with food, cameras, trail cam, books and drawing equipment. It’s only 150 miles but it always takes about six hours, driving across country from South East to North West Wales, taking in the Brecon Beacons, the Cambrian mountains and the Snowdon range on the way; and here we are facing the sunset across the Irish Sea.

And we missed the spring and the summer, so the thrift – briefly reignited by the setting sun – has withered and died back. The silverweed has been shriven by the fierce weather the sloes are small but ripening slowly and to the North an approaching cold front was heavy with broiling clouds, the colour of Payne’s Gray – a colour I love so much I’d be happy to spend an hour painting great swaths of it on watercolour paper. One or two brave field mushrooms were showing their button heads, but with the temperature dropping overnight I don’t think we’ll be having any of them for breakfast for the next few days. When they do come in numbers the flavour is so good you want to eat them on your knees.

Tonight we’ve set up the trail cam looking down the valley towards the sea. It’s thick with impenetrable thorns and a haven for wild birds. As we left the cottage a sparrowhawk flew low overhead, hunting down the length of the valley and as we walked back up from the sea a robin flitted invisibly from tree to tree, singing as if we were playing a game of tag. I’m hoping we’ll at least film a fox during the night, but we won’t get any good results until we’ve prospected the wood for animal tracks.

The only way is up

Many apologies for the long silence – 5 days is something of a record, almost Trappist on my part. We have been out and about doing the usual combination of walking, allotmenteering, grandparenting and so forth; but we’ve also been embracing a rather challenging fitness regime to shed the lockdown lard, so our walks have been both longer and quicker, and given that we live in Bath there’s no escaping some tough hills which are terribly character forming especially on an 800 calorie diet. I won’t bore myself, let alone you, by listing the sufferings mainly because it hasn’t been bad at all. We sleep like logs and always eat up everything on our very small plates.

So today we took ourselves up to the Skyline again, passing St Thomas a Beckett church on the way up, and later on from the top of the hill we could look down across Bath and see any number of towers and spires. I have very mixed feelings about churches. I remember being shocked, when we first went to France, to experience what a truly secular society felt like and yet it seems to me that we’re reaching the same kind of culture here in the UK by neglect. I always used to describe my own churches as “lost luggage offices” where people who were sometimes in great anguish could look for something quite intangible that they’d lost. The building itself seemed to do something very important but I never quite understood how it worked. I was just the keyholder. I would remind myself that Job’s friends were doing really well until they opened their mouths.

St Thomas a Beckett is a place I’ve never been inside. I’m fearful of churches now, fearful that they’ll smell musty and damp; fearful that some well meaning person will offer help and most of all, fearful of meeting my alter ego there. Silence is the only comfort. About ten years ago I was on a course at Canterbury Cathedral, and one evening after it was closed to the public and just getting dark, we were taken on a candlelit tour of the silent building. I think we all (it was a small group) – found the Great Silence when we came to St Thomas a Beckett’s tomb. On another occasion we (Madame and me, that is) went to Chartres with friends and against all my expectations of a kind of Disney/Blackpool experience, I was so powerfully moved that I took my shoes and socks off and walked with bare feet around the Cathedral for a couple of hours. The rest of our group went off for lunch and even in the midst of the crowds I found the Great Silence and I stayed alone.

I know it sounds a bit wacky but bare feet can channel that energy in a way that nothing else can. Because we don’t usually experience the world directly through our feet, it’s very hard to conceptualise what’s going on and it has to be taken on its own terms.

There’s something else that could be said about St Thomas and that’s the fact that he was prepared to make a stand. The capacity for confrontation should be counted as one of the virtues in my view.

But that’s enough of that because our walks haven’t been so focused that there wasn’t any time to stand and watch. Here’s a wasp, and this is the lovely thing about getting into nature because it’s not and ordinary wasp, the picnic spoiling type – although for all I know this one could be a demon when roused. But I noticed it nesting in quite the wrong place to be a common wasp – the rotten core of a felled tree. A quick look at the books when we got home and I discovered it’s called Vespula germanica – the German wasp – a bit bigger than the common wasp, and yes it does sting; so my courageous photo was made safer by the fact that only his bum was sticking out of the hole.

We’ve also spotted a kingfisher on the river bank a couple of times right next to a building site. Today we could hear some kind of raptors in the sky but couldn’t get a close enough glimpse of them to be sure what they were.The piercing peeeoo call, with two distinct ‘syllables’ sounded as if they could have been red kite, which I think have been spotted here; but it was impossible to be sure. However the robin was the winner with its sad, declining cadence. If robins sang in choirs they’d alway be in the minor key. Or perhaps it’s just the smell of autumn in the air getting into my imagination..

Just as we were leaving the Green and walking along the river bank I took a photo of the sun shining through the trees. Goodness knows why I found it so affecting but although I grumble about the loss of the summer, autumn is a season of great beauty and new beginnings – maybe it resonates better with my melancholic default. As I write I can smell another six litres of rich tomato sauce reducing on the stove. The allotment is so abundant at the moment that I could spend every day at the stove and feed the whole block.

The last days of summer (again)

_1080855

Ten days ago (or a hundred years as it seems) we were shivering in the wind and rain in the western fells and lamenting the onset of autumn, but it seems the weather had different ideas and so here we are – still a little less north and just as west – enjoying what may turn out to be the last few days of the oddest season I can remember.  Since the beginning of the year the seasons have switched on and off, occasionally in the wrong order, and kept us allotmenteers guessing. The settled order of the seasons has been torn up by climate change which leaves us wondering how bad this could get. The answer of course is – even worse than this. It’s hard when we’re offered these balmy days both very early and very late in the season not simply to embrace them and be thankful, but the inexorable warming isn’t just providing us with a few extra sunbathing days, it’s melting the ice cap, melting glaciers and raising the sea level whilst heating the sea and generating huge destructive storms. I’ve only been in the path of an oncoming tide once, when a spring tide corresponded with a big melt of snow and a strong wind blowing the surge up the river Avon in Bristol. We were living right next to the river and as the water topped the walls it came across the road towards our house making a sound I’ll never forget. We didn’t get much sleep that night until the tide turned and took the flood away.

_1080856But today the farmers were out baling the straw, and with a couple of days left before the rain returns, they’ll be ready for the winter. The last peaks of the Snowdon range that form a natural boundary to the Lleyn peninsula were standing clear in the blue skies. We walked along the clifftop and below us an abundance of birds were sunning themselves on the rocks – it’s a little paradise here when the wind drops and the sun shines.  Much of the time it can be pretty rough. Near to where we’re staying there are a number of coves you can climb down to, all empty of humans apart from us.

Any spare tme I’ve had this week has been spent clearing gigabytes of junk off my long-suffering laptop  which is ten years old now and I need to keep it going as long as I can. I hate the tedium of messing about with computers but, on the other hand, I completely rely on everything functioning seamlessly in order to be able to concentrate on writing – so routine maintenance is a necessary evil. But art will out, and aside from a few photos of the view I grabbed a closeup of the dried remains of a wild carrot which must have provided the model for an old style lobster creel – I’ll add it to the list of drawings I’ll attempt in the long winter evenings.

%d