I realize, of course, that you may not be as fascinated as I am by sourdough baking; allotmenteering; campervanning; walking; field botany or green spirituality – and if you are fortunate enough not to be bothered by any of them I have no idea why you’re even reading this. My ordinary life would probably be seen as exceptionally boring by most sane people; but then, “ordinary” – to me – is completely fascinating. I sometimes stare at people in a way they might find disconcerting, because every human life is a limitless mystery even if it’s mostly taken up by stuff that’s never going to make it into the newspapers. Even our greatest idiocies and betrayals are crept up on an inch at a time rather than recklessly embraced in an eyes meeting across a crowded room sort of way. We fall in love and fall out of it again; laugh, bawl our eyes out and have cuddles that range from routine maintenance to OMG; love our children and hate them with equal ferocity. We indulge in self-pity and skulduggery, yet occasionally amaze ourselves with an unexpected act of kindness – so yes, I like ordinary, in fact I like it a lot more than exceptional or exciting, an attribute that probably places me on some kind of spectrum.
And having got that off my chest I can write that my new Forkish method loaf came out of the oven just before bedtime last night and it had pancaked spectacularly, exactly as I had anticipated. The whole method was a nightmare of never previously experienced textures; slimy; sticky; cold and wet like a barrel of pilchards. However that wasn’t the end of it because this morning when I hacked a lump off it and spread it with a lustrous layer of butter (I thought I’d better give it half a chance of delighting me) it had all of the rich flavour of my usual bread if a little bit (pleasantly) more acidic. The crust was thinner and much less tooth breaking than usual and the crumb – the actual inner, bread bit – was fabulous. The biggest failing was the collapsed shape which might make one giant flying saucer shaped sandwich if you sliced it horizontally through the middle. The only unforgivable fault was a stratum of flour that must have got there when I tipped more in at a late, panicked, stage and failed to mix it in properly. All in all it was a slow but encouraging first step.
I’ve only got one piece of black iron cookware in the kitchen – a twenty year old crêpe pan that’s never seen the washing up after hundreds if not thousands of crêpes and which never ever sticks. Sadly the new anti-pancake black-iron bread tin got lost in the post when it was sent from Wellington to Bridgewater and then unaccountably to Birmingham instead of Bristol so stage two of the sourdough adventure will have to wait. But even more ordinary screw-ups adorned the day with the blocked sewer downstairs finally being unblocked, but the hot water cylinder in the bathroom springing a leak. Madame was well grumpy by this time and we slept in an uncomfortable silence while the bathroom bucket filled a drip at a time with expensive warm water. On the plus side I had the first civil conversation ever with our landlord’s agent who, after years of getting annoyed with me, has realized that I’m not just grumbling about the black mould to annoy her. Later today we went to the van (you see how ordinary this all is!) and booked in at the garage to get a new cam belt fitted – an expensive job that had me searching the mechanic’s eyes for signs of dissembling : me thinking are you shitting me up? and him thinking (with his best poker face on) “he thinks I’m shitting him up; and him a retired Vicar!” There is, unaccountably, a six week minimum waiting list for this hideously expensive service but I don’t care – our campervan is what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a transitional object, although I think he had rather smaller things like cuddly blankets and teddy bears in mind. It gets us through the darkest days just by being there as a promise of better things to come.
If you look carefully at the right hand photograph you’ll see a little jet of water, reminiscent of a Brussels fountain, exiting a split in a plastic pressure vessel used – so the blurb says – to equalise the water flow at the taps in the campervan. It’s OK, I suppose, but it means keeping the pump turned off unless you want to fill a kettle because it will make loud pumping noises all day and night if you don’t, and it will also empty the main tank very quickly; not a disaster but a bit irritating. Not nearly as irritating, though, as the almost complete absence of internet signal down here near St Anthony’s Head in Cornwall.
Turning to the good bit, we’ve managed to get out into the weather nearly every day and we’ve eaten well and finished up all the sweetcorn, runner beans and tomatoes that we brought with us. We’ve also carried on our exploration of a lane that goes down to the beach from our campsite and turns, about halfway, into a sunken lane which has got a delightful array of unusual and even rare plants – so I’ve been practicing using the new camera to which I’ve added a flash diffuser ring which makes a huge difference to extreme close-ups and macro photos. I’ve also been using a new, cheapest money can buy, GPS, which is actually very good for recording accurate grid references and saves me recording plants in the middle of the sea. Both the camera and my phone boast that they give grid references in the EXIF data but they can be hopelessly unreliable.
The yellow flower at the top is of the unaccountably named Dark Mullein that we found growing on what must be a collapsed Cornish wall. In the same short stretch we’ve found Red Bartsia, Hedge Woundwort and Babington’s Leeks alongside all the usual suspects, and just up the lane we found a single flower among hundreds of Yellow Flowered Strawberries, known as Yard Strawberries in the US and which I’ve been assuming were common wild strawberries for years. We followed a man accompanied by half a dozen female fans, down the lane on a foraging walk. I hope he didn’t make the same mistake as I have for years. Apparently they’re inedible if not poisonous. I’d never have discovered that from tasting them because I’m very suspicious of the impact of foraging when it goes too far. Down here whole lanes of Wild Garlic have been stripped and sold off to posh restaurants. As if you could gain any esoteric knowledge or benefit of the wild by eating it?
The rest of the time has been spent revisiting some old (plant) friends, now in seed, to tie down their exact names. I’ve been looking at a clump of wild Radish for three or four years, trying to distinguish them from Sea Radish and yesterday I got the evidence I was looking for; an unmistakable string of beads seed capsule and a single yellow flower to seal the deal. I made some progress with the same problem of Wild Carrot/Sea Carrot and comparing the seed heads I’m nearer to understanding which is which.
If you can seriously enlarge the right hand picture you’ll see the exquisite spiked seeds of the clifftop carrot – a sculptor’s gift! As for the wild Leeks, the seed heads have now become balls of fully formed bulblets, like tiny onion sets. I picked up a few and we’ll see if we can grow them on the allotment.
Apart from all that, reading, and ten hours of sleep most nights, I’ve been working on my database of plants, their locations and photos – hence the frustration with the internet. Yes I’m aware this all sounds a bit eccentric but it’s my happy place and that’s not up for negotiation!
Ivy in flower – a late treat for the Ivy bees on our allotment or, in this case a pair of Drone Flies – Eristalis tenax
No – we were looking forward to a more Wordsworthian sort of Spring
Much to our surprise we woke this morning to a couple of inches of snow. You might describe our present weather as topsy turvy, but that would trivialise it. We were chatting the other day and what seems clear is that one of the early warnings of climate catastrophe is the sheer unpredictability of the weather. On the allotment the old certainties are falling one by one. Good Friday, for instance, is the traditional day for planting potatoes (in the UK) and that gives it six weeks to wander over the calendar in any case, due to the synchronisation (or lack of it) between the solar and the lunar calendars. But today after February broke all records for warmth and rainfall, the snow came as a complete surprise. Madame and I sat in bed this morning feeling just a bit smug because we’d spent much of the week preparing the campervan for just such an event; draining the water tank and such like. Since we came back from Dartmoor – or more precisely from a workshop on an industrial estate outside Ivybridge – we’ve been preparing the van so we can get away and start enjoying the luxury of having everything now working properly. Only four years ago the electrics failed completely one January night and we had to huddle in the sleeping bag with only head torches for light.
I don’t know why we haven’t walked on Dartmoor for so long. We’re blessed for high country here in the Southwest, with Dartmoor, Exmoor and Bodmin Moor to the south and across the Severn and westwards we’ve got the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons), the Cambrian Mountains and then mighty Eryri (Snowdonia). I’m not one of those people who grumble about the change of names from English to Welsh. Years ago I did a lot of bus journeys running writers’ groups in South Wales and I simply had to learn how to pronounce Welsh place names. Ystrad Mynach was a particular struggle, but Welsh is a phonetic language and once you know a few simple rules, like the fact that “y” is a vowel in Welsh, it’s painfully easy to sound as if you know where you’re going.
But crossing Dartmoor a couple of times last week – we had to commute between the campsite and the workshop – we felt very drawn towards it. Our first visit was more than forty years ago when we stayed near Burrator and found the Devonshire Leat, a quite wonderful piece of industrial archaeology, and one which – given my attachment to abandoned industrial landscapes – resonated within me. It’s not even that I search for them, they just seem to find me. I can almost hear the voices from the past in them; miners and quarrymen; shepherds and packhorse drivers; tinkers and overseers. Safe paths across the peat bogs mark their passage across the centuries and standing stones celebrate or warn of ancient beliefs and untimely deaths.
Part, I think, of the Grimstone and Sortridge leat on Whitchurch Common, Dartmoor
This photograph was taken in March 2016 and it took a bit of finding because there was no location amongst the EXIF data – those were the days! We were staying in the campervan near Tavistock and we’d come down from the northern area of the moor – just mooching about really, enjoying the early months of retirement and going through that long process of asking – if not work, what are we for? I’d asked an old friend whose partner had retired before me, how long it took her to embrace the freedom. Much to my consternation she replied “five years?”. Looking back, I’d say for me closer to eight. Here are a few more photographs from one of our very first journeys in October 2016.
Knowing next to nothing about fungi I photographed the waxcap among dozens of brightly coloured neighbours and then discovered years later that their presence is a sign of unimproved land. Patently obvious, I now know, but that’s how understanding happens.
This time in Ivybridge we went to the local bookshop and I bought a couple of books. One of them – Guy Shrubsole’s “The Lost Rainforests of Britain” is so good I read it – or rather devoured it -in two days. It’s a marvellous and accessible account of an almost unknown and rapidly disappearing habitat – and before long I’d gathered together all the resources on my bookshelves that would help me to understand these sites better. If that sounds a bit worthy it’s really not. For years I’ve been a bit obsessed with ferns, fungi, mosses, lichens and all the other woodland species that characterise this rare habitat; but my obsession has focused on their appearance – they can be very beautiful. Now I’m going to dig into the science and identification of them. Suddenly the new season has gifted me a project. The second book, Karen Armstrong’s “Sacred Nature” is altogether different and although she raises all kinds of ideas I’m familiar with, there’s no dirt under its fingernails.
The workshop removed the twisted wreck of a satellite aerial from the roof of the campervan and installed a much neater and lower profile miFi outfit. It seems a bit extravagant but I always need internet access on our travels to the public natural history databases which are so full of expertise and advice. We’re off very soon for some time in Eryri (Snowdonia) to spark up the botanical appetite, grease our creaking knees and get our eyes working.
This photograph doesn’t nearly capture the drama and force of the river Erme just as it passed beneath the old bridge at the top of Fore street in Ivybridge. We turned around and crossed the bridge and looked down into something resembling a maelstrom; an unsurvivable torrent of peat-stained moor water shouldering down the narrow and deep river bed, past shops and houses and old mill buildings and out beyond the town, heading towards its seafall below Holbeton. Forty years ago we swam in the river at Mothecombe as I was recovering from a bout of viral pneumonia. Swimming upstream was hard work, but the return journey made us feel like Olympic athletes.
How to describe the indescribable power of floodwater haunts my mind. I dream about it and think about it constantly because it always carries a wealth of meaning, a hierarchy of suggestion. So far in one paragraph I’ve ventured –maelstrom; unsurvivable torrent; shouldering; drama and force. I see the water as if it were a flayed body on an anatomist’s slab, the knotted musculature speaking of movement; but poorly because that’s too static altogether because its days of carousing are over. Another image that came to me last night in the dark, was the sound of an invading army of infantry, advancing silently in the dark; but again the murmuring, even of an imaginary crowd of football fans bent on mischief has the menace but nowhere near the vocal range, the musicality of the water as it twists and turns over boulders. Then I thought of the twisting of the flooding river as a cable, and later as a rope (more flexible). I thought of a rope walk where the separate fibres are spun and drawn together creating strength and flexibility out of shorter fibres. But finally two steps came to my aid at once in my thoughts. Why not wool? Imagine that sheep are now the principal inhabitants of the moor and even the longest fleece must be spun into woollen yarn. The history of the moor, now that the mines have closed, is written in wool. The farmer shears; the fuller cleans; the spinner spins; a skein of wool draws together every corner of the moor and finally the sleins are woven or knitted. I like to think of the streams and tributaries contributing their ten pennyworth into the great yarn of water flowing towards the sea. And what could be woven from that yarn? Is there a place for the lady in the Sally Army? a place for the dodgy taxi driver, the ten firms of solicitors that cluster in the town, the psychotic man shouting at no-one, the local ladies of a certain age drawing raffle tickets in the Italian cafe, the bookshop owner and the cafe proprietor, the despondent landlord? The customers of the innumerable charity shops and the fast food outlets. The history of the moor isn’t written as much in the big events as in bus tickets, receipts and whispered adulteries in the bar. It’s Llareggub, the yarn of poets, woven from the water that has seen it all and washed it all away.
Anyway, enough lyrical stuff! The reason we were in Ivybridge at all was nothing to do with having memories recalled, but because the campervan was needing some repairs done about three miles up the road. In the past we’ve sat in the waiting room but we knew that this was going to be at least a day’s work and there’s a limit to the amount of sitting around I can tolerate. The principal repair – or at least it was when we first arranged the appointment – was to replace the badly degraded and cracked vac-formed sink. But then the mission creep crept in, and we added investigation of the non-functioning leisure battery charger, the removal of the old satellite dish that detached itself noisily one day when we were driving back from the Brecon Beacons – now known as Bannau Brycheiniog and getting the gas jet on the 3 way fridge working after three years. This time we decided to skip the 4.00 am alarm call to get us there in time for the workshop to open and we booked a couple of nights at the campsite just outside Tavistock so we could take a more relaxed approach with a night in the van either side of the appointment.
In view of the appalling weather we delayed leaving until lunchtime when the driving rain eased off; but just as we parked up at the campsite we noticed an old fault – a busted fuel filter – pouring diesel on to the gravel. I didn’t need to think twice about the cause, but the cure – at nearly 5.00pm was more problematic. Suddenly the early start at the workshop was in peril. Anyway I rang the AA and explained the fault and, wonderfully an AA van pulled in 20 minutes later carrying a spare. This man really knew his stuff and we were repaired inside fifteen minutes.
The next morning we resolved not to drive over the moor on account of the weather, but the satnav paid no attention and before long we found ourselves on roads, but especially bridges which were all too close to the width of the van. We soldiered on in the driving rain with Madame in brace position most of the way and eventually we arrived twenty minutes later than planned at the workshop; dropped the van off and called a taxi (I’m not going to name the company). The driver was a bit of a shock. An old friend of ours, a scientist, told us how he and his student friends had invented a new unit of measurement – the millihelen – which was the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. Our driver was somewhere down in the microhelen range, with a prominent hooked nose, deeply lined skin and what can only have been an expensive Beatle wig, improbably auburn and shining like spun plastic. He was also very difficult to engage in conversation but that wasn’t a problem because he was the most erratic driver I’ve met in years. We took the longest possible route on the way there which cost us £14 – and not the guide price of £10 – but in fairness it was further because he used the A38 and we were glad to be alive. On the way home he took the back roads for reasons which became obvious because he had obviously been using cocaine and carried on snorting noisily on nothing as we careered around the edge of Dartmoor at a cost of £10 and possibly a couple of counselling sessions. On the bright side he recommended an Italian place and dropped us off outside it.
It was absolutely freezing on Thursday. Ivybridge under black skies looked like the kind of place that sheep gather in shop doorways to shelter and then die of exposure anyway. The cafe – Marco’s Trattoria in Fore street was wonderful; lovely food; warm and functioning as a real social hub. The owners, we discovered when we spoke to one of them, were both professional engineers and huge fans of Italian cooking. We had a revealing conversation about her engineer’s take on making pizzas which involved the strictest time and temperature protocols.
The bookshop about two doors away was just what you’d expect with a decent local collection, loads of maps and natural history. I couldn’t resist buying a couple of books – local bookshops struggle to survive, and so desperate were we to stay out of the freezing weather that we even went into the bank and spent twenty minutes in a warm queue in order to make a cash transfer that I could have done in one minute on the laptop. Then a couple of turns around the centre of town before my fingers went white and I couldn’t feel them any more. On our way around we discovered a microbrewery being run as a social enterprise, and Madame was overwhelmed by the kindness of a Salvation Army volunteer who she asked where the toilets could be found and took her inside to their day centre. I was outside in the rain, and one of their customers passed me shouting at no-one in particular with the most appalling racist threats which, given his nationality, was rather surprising. With two and a half hours still to fill we sat in the better looking of the pubs for a couple of hours over a pint of Guinness until it was time for the taxi driver to put his razor blade away and fetch us. The Landlord had moved down from Northampton in October and he reckoned it had rained every day since then. When I told the taxi drive story to our youngest son he said that people always think that city centres are where it all happens, but he reckoned the real crazies live out in the sticks. Our oldest son said – “how do you think taxi drivers survive the hours without the coke”. That’s me put in my place then!
When we got back to the workshop, one look at the boss’s professionally mournful face told us that the job could not be finished in a day and so we arranged to come back the following morning. We drove to the campsite through Plymouth to avoid the roads across the moor but it turned out to be a totally stupid decision because the centre of the city was utterly clogged – possibly by the discovery of a 500lb wartime bomb and a recently changed traffic layout that foxed the sat nav completely and sent us around Derriford Hospital in an endless traffic jam. In the end we turned off the A386 on to the moor again.
On Friday morning – we didn’t need to discuss it – we set out across the moor and loved it. It was still raining and the bridges hadn’t been miraculously widened during the night; we even saw a few flurries of powdery snow but yesterday’s nightmare journey was vindicated by the scenery and the 40mph speed limit which was a very safe speed with sheep and horses everywhere. As we passed over the 12 century bridge at Horrabridge, Madame had an inspired moment as she recognised the Spar shop and the cottage we’d stayed at when our first baby was only 6 months old. He had screamed for hours and Madame had convinced herself that it was because he “didn’t like the wallpaper”. I went up to the Spar shop and bought a tub of Ski yoghurt which he downed hungrily and quickly, promptly falling asleep after eating possibly the most corrupting food I could possibly have given him. Later I stood in the garden and wondered whether I could cope with fatherhood at all.
In a couple of hours the job was finished and we drove home with a new sink, a functioning miFi system with a new smart TV, a fridge that worked on gas once more and a functional charging unit. We even found a garage that sold LPG on the A38, although the wheelie I did to get into it may have perplexed a few people and so – as they say – all our ducks were in a row. The smile on the mechanic’s face as we left the workshop suggested that we may have paid for his summer holiday too!
As a small postscript to this, I should say that a couple of weeks ago I bought a polo necked sweater knitted from raw Welsh Black sheeps’ wool to the same pattern worn by Ernest Shackleton. It cost an arm and a leg, and it smells like a sheep (lovely!) but it’s just the toughest and warmest garment you could imagine. I also bought the matching beanie but I think I may already have mislaid it somewhere. So although I can’t boast of weaving a history I can at least lay claim to wearing a bit of it, although confusingly it’s not black but brown; beautiful, warm, smelly brown.
Clockwise – Peltigera, Dog Lichen; Scarlet Elf Cap, 2 views of Woodchester Lake at the bottom of a steep valley; a spring at Tinkley Gate about 500 feet above it, and a Musketeer at his lunch; plus a rear view of a fabulous borrowed Swarovski birding scope which another of us carried all day without complaining (or seeing anything except wood pigeons through it!)
Life is not always a primrose path, and these past weeks have not disappointed. We’ve (and I mean all of us, not just me), been suffocated by the evil miasma arising from truly shocking events. The continuing genocide in Gaza, the insanity of the forthcoming American elections, not to mention those here in the UK; the managerialist cruelty of the Post Office scandal and too many random instances of egregious evil, lying, fraud and misrepresentation in the government; not to mention breaking through the 1.5C barrier, licencing new oil wells and allowing millions of children to languish in poverty. It sucks all the air out of the room and makes me feel like a gaffed fish dumped on the deck of a boat steering into a maelstrom. To go out looking for plants or growing them on the allotment feels like a wilful betrayal. Like a grieving parent I feel guilty when a brief moment of sunshine brings a flash of pleasure. I shouldn’t be feeling this – I think – as I grimly return to the nightmare.
But needs must, and the past weeks have been filled with our annual debate about whether to sell or keep the campervan; and also prepare for a field trip which I’m co-leading. As for the campervan, it’s getting old now and so every year it needs some expensive TLC. This year it’s a new sink – the old one cracked and disintegrated; we’ve also decided to get the 3 way fridge repaired so the gas works again, and investigate the slow charge rate going to the batteries and then to remove the old satellite dish which had made a valiant attempt to tear itself off the roof coming back from Brecon one day. When I asked about replacing it I was told that they haven’t fitted a satellite dish for years, so now we’re having a new miFi which necessitates a new TV and a substantial chunk of our savings. That’s the downside. The upside is that the campervan is still a lot cheaper to run than renting cottages and in any case we love it, love the opportunities it brings to go botanizing and walking where we please.
As for the field trip in these days of elf and safety, there must be planning and risk assessment which needs to go further than a quick look at the OS Map. Just the kind of mission that the Musketeers love to undertake – even on a bitterly cold and windy day with intermittent rain. So to Woodchester, or rather to Tinkley Gate (Tickly Bottom as we decided to call it), and which is at the top of the steep sided valley. We three, being of mature years, decided to take the blue route which the notice board specifically admonished us not to take. It was, as advertised, wet and muddy, steep and slippery and also closed in part; denying us any possibility of an easier return to the car park. Of course it’s the wrong time of the year for bosky dells and wildflowers although we saw several seasonal fungi; and of birds there were almost none. A Mallard with two mates, Robins and Coal tits heard but not seen, a gang of depressed wood pigeons, a Raven, a pair of Cormorants – in fact a dark hue all round apart from a brief glimpse of what – by its chestnut wings and purposeful flight – could have been a Kestrel; but which appeared and disappeared in less than a second below us in the woods. Our trek back up the muddy path to the car park was a triumph of concealed athleticism – each stopping breathlessly every few yards to let the others catch up.
So this week’s task is to tabulate the risks and to access a few databases to see what could be there in late April. Funnily enough I was supposed to be doing a solo lecture on AI and the slew of phone apps and public databases that have taken out some of the sting of identifying wildlife. Unfortunately Cardinal Richelieu has decided that he needs to be on hand to correct every other sentence and spearhead a swift return to WADITW which is the guiding principle of all failing voluntary institutions. The acronym stands for we always do it this way, so I may withdraw and produce a version of the same talk on The Potwell Inn.
Coincidentally, a wonderful new book was published this month by Pelagic Press (I paid good cash for my copy, there are no sponsored pages on this blog!). The book is entitled “Frustrating Flowers & Puzzling Plants” by John M Warren, and it will be of most interest to UK and Irish readers. It’s not a flora as much as a compendium of ID tips for some of the most difficult plant families like Speedwells, or Dead Nettles, Mints and Woundworts for instance, which have baffled me for years with only transitory moments of illumination. It features some really excellent illustrations, and a new kind of tabular key that can take us from genus to species in some of the most complex families. All of this accompanied by a very dry sense of humour. Each section ends with a paragraph on how far should I go where he takes aim at some of the more obsessive corners of field botany and made me laugh out loud – occasionally at myself! There’s a whole chapter on one of the turning points in my botanical journey when I finally realized that not all Dandelions are, in fact, Dandelions at all. It’s called Yellow composites – things that look a bit like a dandelion. As I read it I realized, joyfully, how far I’ve come since that day sixty years ago, and yet how far there is still to go. I love this book. It’s going into my bag for a bit of a laser focused plant naming binge this summer along with Baby Stace (sorry, Concise Flora).
If anything can lift my mood at the moment it’s the prospect of a trip in the campervan, laden with books, smartphone and laptop. Madame even suggested the other day that we could go for a whole month. I felt the sun rise inside me.
Each one of these photographs has a share in today’s post. The first two on the top line are celebrating the fact that we finally finished harvesting our summer seasonal crops on the allotment. So Borlotti and the last of the tomatoes are in the photograph, but outside the flat we’ve got old and new potatoes, and squashes while still on the allotment are peppers, cucumber, beetroot and chard, runner beans and seven varieties of apple; so all in all not a bad year and the stores are full for the winter and hungry gap. It was hard work getting everything ready to come away, especially in the midst of a heatwave but we got it all finished and ready so we could come down here and do some end of season botanizing.
Sadly the campervan had other ideas and so I’ve spent hours crawling around in impossibly small spaces attempting to diagnose three distinct problems – ghost drain on the leisure batteries, bad contacts on the fridge supply and an apparently non functioning battery charger. Apart from the lethal possibilities of poking around in the circuitry hidden behind the wardrobe, I tend to get cramps and my arms are covered in bruises. I found that the grey plastic distribution board had a big boys section (live mains) and a child’s play area for the 12 v circuits. Luckily there was no temptation to do anything other than housekeeping because the fine weather broke this morning with such vengeful and remorseless storms that we spent the rest of the day trying to get two sets of wet clothes dry again. On the plus side I’ve found fuses where I didn’t even know there were places and I’ve thanked Harold Wilson for inventing the Technical School which gave me the confidence to approach these problems rationally and without fainting. Classical education is all very well but it doesn’t understand circuits. I feel uniquely fortunate that in addition to the technical stuff I learned Chaucer, 2 modern languages, 20th century American poets and discovered singing before I discovered hormones.
There’s another day’s Camino lined up and I may try and finish it tomorrow but there’s one place I need to go back to again. It’s our absolute favourite walk down the bridleway from Gerrans to Percuil harbour. On Thursday we sat on the bank of the creek and listened to the Curlew and all the other seabirds and it felt as if I was floating halfway between earth and heaven. These liminal places, on the edges of sea, sky and land belong to no-one and are in constant motion. It’s possible, here, to imagine an earth without me and not feel sad about it.
Looking down Percuil River towards St Mawes and the English Channel.
We came to buy our 2009 MURVI campervan almost by accident. We’d always been hardcore tent campers; even to the extent that we’d given up on modern fabrics because they were far too noisy in bad weather and reverted to cotton which was quieter and more breathable. The thought of caravans or campervans hadn’t entered our minds. Then one day we were out for a walk and we passed a school sports field where we saw our first MURVI and fell for it instantly. We even had a conversation about it and agreed that in the unlikely event that we ever had a campervan that would be the one.
The next thing that happened was that a couple of friends drove up to see us in exactly the same model we’d seen – so we were able to inspect it at close quarters and we loved it even more. The big mistake was to drive down to Exeter one Sunday afternoon to a regional show – just to look. Ha Ha! There was never any possibility of us buying a new van but we still got the full sales pitch so while I enjoyed the moment Madame went off and found a postcard small ad for an older 09 model second hand. Of course we still couldn’t afford even this one – we were about to blow most of our savings – and so we drove home empty handed. This next bit is amazing and rather beautiful because that very week an old friend offered to make a substantial and completely unexpected gift so that we could afford the van – and so we finally got our MURVI eleven years ago and it’s become our little place in the country, our field station and our solace in stressful times.
Now if that sounds exactly what you’d most love go ahead, but you need to factor in the constant need to maintain. Aside from tax, insurance and secure storage, all of which add up to just over £1000 a year; parts wear out and need replacing and whilst it’s possible to retain a head full of elaborate workarounds to keep the show on the road sooner or later everything finally wears out. So we put up with the minor inconvenience of having to blow up one of the tyres every week because in spite of all our attempts neither we nor the tyre centre can discover what’s causing it to deflate. The wonderful onboard heater is a highly sophisticated piece of German engineering but when the controller goes wrong it’s three figures. Water pumps wear out and the batteries – three in total – also have a finite life, and be warned, everything in a campervan runs on 12V, so if a leisure battery fails everything else goes as well. It’s no use thinking the mains electricity hookup will take over. Fancy alarm systems will drain the battery almost overnight. We once spent an icy week sitting in sleeping bags using head torches for light. That was fun! Oh and three way fridges well least said soonest mended – or perhaps you can do what we do and rejoice in the simplicity of the two-way fridge. Ten minutes on any campervan club website will give an abundance of ways of bringing the gas mode to life and trust me I’ve tried them all.
So we carry a reasonably comprehensive toolkit including a multimeter and we find that most things can be lashed up or repaired without resorting to ‘experts‘. The essence of campervanning is an ability to have fun even in a van that’s not quite perfect. Good enough is king! and it’s always better to use the onboard cludger than to trudge across a field in the middle of the night in a force 8 storm – we’ve done that and dried the T shirt, which takes days – especially in Wales. The campervan is the ultimate go anywhere home from home – with all my books for plant hunting, a portable router that can find a signal almost anywhere and a bottle of wine or three.
Possibly the best thing of all is that provided you’re prepared to be a bit flexible, you can be spontaneous and take off at the drop of a hat, even out of season. We’re not fans. we’re addicts; but the key thing is that in 30 years of tent camping taught us that the key to a happy camping life is resilience.
Bath Natural Theatre Company strutting their stuff in the early 70’s
We were there – well not there in the photograph, but around at the time and living near Bath – which made lunch last week with one of the original provocateurs and his partner a total joy. Most young people probably think we’re a bunch of old farts who never did anything interesting – after all the world was only invented when they came along – but here’s the evidence – complete with incriminating photos and only mildly bowdlerized accounts of the fun and games that went on. There was a serious side to the counterculture because it helped mobilize public opinion against the Buchanan Plan which was contemplating the destruction of one of Bath’s most historic neighbourhoods in order to build a huge road. As it was, a great chunk of old Bath was demolished in favour of ugly flats – now a local crime hotspot – a habit which has continued with the recent Crest Nicholson Western Riverside development which would make a Russian bonded warehouse look good. There’s a well known polemic called The Sack of Bath written in 1973 by Adam Fergusson which also threw a spanner into the planners’ designs and undoubtedly helped save Bath from wholesale destruction. Interestingly we bumped into his daughter in a bar in Hay on Wye in December. She was very proud of her Dad who’s still alive. We need him back here!
A lot of last week was taken up haggling with recalcitrant software. As ever the obvious problem with my mobile router never occurred to me until I’d tried everything else out and wasted vast amounts of energy shouting fruitlessly at a lump of space junk whose only fault was an expired SIM card. Of course, somewhere at the back of my disorderly mind I’d known it all along, but – hey ho. The router will soon be needed as we get the campervan back on the road. After a couple of years of Covid when we often couldn’t use the van, we’d seriously considered selling it. It costs a lot of money just to leave it standing in a compound doing nothing and we thought it might be better to spend the money on trips. For one whole evening we even thought we’d buy an interrail pass and spend six months back in Europe. The downside to these utopian plans was always that we have a family, an allotment, the Bath Nats and a pile of friends we like to keep in touch with. In the cold light of morning and whilst putting the empties out, Plan A sounded a bit naff because what we really really enjoy is to park the campervan up on a site somewhere quiet and remote in the midst of a wildlife hotspot – like Mendip or mid Wales for instance – and go walking, birdwatching and plant hunting. So the plan was shelved with the two of us in complete agreement that we needed to keep the van.
The campervan’s been standing idle since we got back from St Davids in September and whilst we agonised over it we also neglected it a bit, so as well as software wars we also took ourselves down to the edge of the Severn to get the batteries recharged and to empty out the cupboards and generally get it ready for spring. We soon found that the upholstery had got very damp, the sink needed repairing (again!) and the mice had raided for nest building materials although a thorough search failed to find any nests; cue much more irritable spluttering and rummaging through tiny spaces at the expense of bashed elbows and a sore head. Ah – life’s rich tapestry – we thought as we lumped an 80lb generator and our dehumidifier into the car along with a spare battery and a heap of tools.
However, amidst all these distractions I also managed to spend time getting my head in gear for plant hunting in a few weeks time; checking out useful databases and maps and scouring lists. I do love a good list – this may be some kind of symptom. The upshot of all this botanical fantasising was that at the AGM on Saturday I volunteered to join the Council of the Bath Nats, thereby turning my retirement resolution never to join another committee – on its head. Naturally (it’s a voluntary organisation) my offer was warmly accepted and after a brief moment of undeserved pride I fell into a pit of self-doubt, bordering on imposter syndrome. The members of the Council are just so much more experienced and knowledgeable than me, they’ll find me out in a moment. Another sleepless night.
The van’s called Polly – it’s a he!
And so today has two tasks; to go back to the van and figure out how to carry out the necessary repairs and to run the dehumidifier for a few hours now we’ve remembered to put some petrol into the generator. Then I need to get a new data SIM and get the router working and sit down with Madame and plan the seed order for the allotment. We’ve already agreed to simplify and to concentrate on low maintenance plants to give ourselves more time for the other things we like to do. Then there’s marmalade to make as well. Who knew retirement could be so exhausting?
Another trip to the farmers market yielded a chastening surprise at the weekend. We were in something of a hurry because we we expecting a family visitation to celebrate our son’s birthday and so we sold our souls and picked what looked like a healthy looking bakery stall and stocked up on padding. Not – I should add – the indispensable thin sliced industrial white (only used for summer pudding at the Potwell Inn), but sourdough loaves bearing all the imprints of banneton and human labour and with a corresponding price tag.
Being a regular home baker myself, I expect to make better bread than most bakeries simply because my time and experience come free of charge. There are no rents, rates or wages to find each month and if the loaves are a couple of hours late coming out of the oven, nobody dies or goes bust. So what can you say about bread that looks exactly like the real deal but lacks any single distinguishing feature? With bread, and almost any other artisanal food you could name; time equals flavour. Bread that’s rushed through the process in a few hours will never, can never develop the full flavour of the wheat or rye. It might look like the real thing; the crust bursting with energy, the crumb textbook, the rise prodigious but without time – and I mean lots of it – it will never taste of anything and be fit only as a platform for something that does taste delicious. Good bread, cheeses, pickles and ferments are all the same in their demands for time and human judgement.
There used to be a Chinese restaurant in Bristol whose menus were masterpieces of brevity. “Steamed fish”, for example was a whole carp, steamed on a bed of aromatic vegetables – wonderful. It was always honest as well; no item on the menu was buried under a landslide of adjectives. You either liked chickens’ feet or you didn’t with or without the anointing of such words as luscious, velvety or exotic. There’s a huge Chinese supermarket in East Bristol that will sell you a box of frozen pork cervix. Please don’t feel obliged to buy them on my account!
We’re so accustomed to supermarket photographs of fictionalised farmers surrounded by their happy animals (my chickens are soooo free range they even have a community centre and a table tennis team) that we don’t so much buy nourishment as lifestyle narratives, and of course this means that we rarely get to taste the real stuff. Of course you can bake bread that looks like the loaves in the latest edition of Country Life but I fear that a splash of sourdough starter for flavour accompanied by a good deal of conventional yeast, a short warm rise and a lot of steam is what we usually get. Worse still, our palates are so habituated to bland food, we find fully flavoured properly made food overwhelming, even unpleasant. Just as a treat I bought in some really good cheeses for the family to try on Saturday. Apart from me, nobody liked them – their loss, my gain I suppose but what a shame to live in a world of bland, grey flavours when you could experience the orchestra of a well made Cheddar. Sadly, in marketing food, all too often more creativity is expended on the promotional material than on the product.
Anyway, there’s been more than food alone on our minds this week. The campervan roof light has been leaking recently and after a few abortive emails to local repairers we made contact with the company that built our van and they immediately agreed to repair it yesterday. The snag was that we had to be there when the workshop opened and it was on the far side of Dartmoor. So it was a 4.00am alarm and then a drive down to the banks of the Severn to collect the van from its storage facility, and then driving down the motorway in what still felt like the middle of the night. There’s always something exciting about night driving and by 7.00am we could see the first intimations of sunrise as the sky took on a faintly damson flushed with peach hue to the east, with a three quarter waning moon in the sky above and the Somerset levels frosted in the first really cold night of winter. We arrived in good time and after three hours the van was restored and we drove north with Dartmoor to our left, looking ravishing in the clear blue skies.
More about rats
I was turning the compost heap last week and, one after another, three large and very sleek rats abandoned ship and scooted off up the path. One of them went in the general direction of Madame – who was weeding – and a piercing cry went up – an eeeeeeeoooooaaaaaaach – sort of noise. I don’t know about the rat but it scared the living daylights out of me. I think it’s as much the unexpectedness of their appearances that’s the most unnerving thing. They have a tendency to sit the disturbance out until there’s no alternative but to bolt. I’ve had one jump right over my shoulder on one occasion. We’ve got a trail cam on the plot and we’ve filmed cats, mice, foxes, squirrels and badgers, but it’s the ubiquitous rats that trigger the camera more often than any of the others.
So are there so many more this year? Without the benefit of a proper survey, I’d say that without doubt this year has seen the largest infestation we’ve ever seen. It’s not quite Hamelin but it’s almost impossible to drive past the entrance without disturbing two or three, and there can be very few allotmenteers who haven’t seen a few at least. They have a prodigious capacity to breed, and therein lies one possible solution to the problem. It’s entirely natural for populations to grow to the point where disease, overcrowding and food shortages drive the population down again. It’s a possibility but we shouldn’t hold our breath.
It’s said that the lockdown and the closure of the restaurants and fast food outlets led populations of rats and gulls alike to look for food beyond the city centre and, I suppose, we’re providing it. I’ve read that the gulls hardly bred at all in the first lockdown although they certainly seem to have recovered well by now. We’ve tried just about every conceivable way of discouraging them and there’s no single answer. I suppose not composting kitchen peelings and veg waste would be a start but it would be at the expense of our compost heaps. You can always see when they’ve paid a visit because they dig distinctive tunnels in the upper surfaces and often have toilet areas where you can see their droppings. We all know that rats can be carriers of leptospirosis so at the very least we need to be meticulous about wearing gloves and observing personal hygiene when handling compost. They don’t like being disturbed and they won’t enter very hot heaps – which is an encouragement to turn heaps regularly and work them hard. 55C plus a yard fork will put the most determined squatter off.
I’ve never made bokashi but it’s said that rats don’t like the strong taste and smell of fermented waste. Kitchen waste can be converted in a wormery so that there’s little left of any interest to the rodents. Traps, to my mind, are a waste of money because rats are clever little critters and once they’ve been activated they’ll never go near them again. We won’t use poisons because we love the other creatures, and secondary poisoning is a real issue with rat poison and slug pellets alike. Ask yourself why there are no hedgehogs on our allotments?
And that leaves barriers – fine chicken wire wrapped around wooden heaps and tight fitting lids because they’re great climbers. But they’re also great tunnellers so the chicken wire needs to be brought out horizontally at the bases of heaps as you might do when fox-proofing a chicken run. One final suggestion which we’re testing at the moment is to fill any tunnels with wire wool and ram it in firmly with a crowbar. Apparently they are greatly averse to chewing through it! – and who could blame them?
What doesn’t work? Gardening lore is about as useful as Old Moore’s Almanac so ignore the advice that they don’t like citrus peel because they do, as do the worms as well. And there’s one more tactic which does absolutely nothing to reduce numbers but it can transform our relationship with rats. Actually they’re very clever, very resourceful and often quite handsome animals. If we’re serious about wildlife gardening then we don’t get to choose the cuddly bits and slaughter the rest. This year we managed to keep the badgers off most of the sweetcorn with a ring of steel; but the rats simply moved in and took their place. We would see them swaying at the top of a plant nibbling away happily. But we managed to harvest about half the crop and enjoy it. We don’t moan when the bees eat our pollen or the birds eat our seeds so maybe the rat too should be considered part of life’s rich tapestry and a perfect supper for a hungry fox too.
You know how it always takes a while to figure out what’s going on, but surely (at least in the UK) we can agree that it’s a cold spring – and I don’t mean that we’ve had some cold weather because that goes without saying, but after being lulled into a sense that winter is over by a couple of balmy days, we’ve gone backwards by what feels like six weeks; chilled by a seemingly immovable wind from the northeast which only occasionally swings around to the west to gather some more sleet. Over in France and Spain too they’ve experienced some very extensive damage to crops, including grape vines. It’s difficult to make a direct link to the climate emergency but these extreme events have every appearance of being the smoking gun. Something’s wrong when the average temperature is way below normal and yet we’re having to water because the earth is so dry. “That’s gardening” we say to ourselves hopefully – “… you win some and you lose some”; but are we just kidding ourselves? In Bath we’ve had to cope with illegal levels of atmospheric pollution for years because local politics has been torn between reducing traffic and increasing income from students, businesses and tourism. Now, to add to the evil mix, the SUV has become the vehicle of choice for city centre aspirationals. It seems we all agree that something must be done, but the proposals for reducing traffic have been so watered down by the tourism and transport lobbies that the politicians are running scared. Councillors elected on a green manifesto to reduce traffic have crumpled under the pressure and there are rumours of palace revolutions while local bloggers have poured out their bile on those of us who challenge their so-called ancient freedoms – like driving a three litre Range Rover 1/4 mile to collect Tarquin and Cressida from school.
Anyway, all this cold weather presents us with a storage problem at the Potwell Inn, because a traffic jam of tender plants has built up and is now occupying every conceivable space in the flat, leaving nowhere to germinate the next wave of cucurbits; the cucumbers, squashes and melons – not to mention the sweetcorn and the runner (pole) beans. We’ve hatched a plan to construct a third unheated propagator under our original daylight fluorescent lamps because they give out far more heat than the newer LED’s. Desperation inspires ingenuity and we can probably get by.
Not all ingenuity seems to work, though, and I have to report that my genius attempt to lure the rats into the traps with exceptionally smelly camembert cheese fell upon deaf nostrils, as it were, and the hoped for carnage did not come about. It was at least reassuring that the trailcam worked perfectly. Alas we’ve yet to find a reliable way of controlling their numbers.
If you look very closely you’ll see the rat emerging fit and healthy from the trap before exiting down the path.
Much of the week has been taken up by getting the campervan ready for a single night on the Mendips to make sure all the systems are working properly. Our last trip – over a year ago – saw the electrics collapse in domino fashion and we spent the week reading by torchlight and huddled in the sleeping bags to keep warm. When the electrics go in a campervan nothing works – water pump, stove ignition, lighting and heating all go into a sulk. All this was replaced and patched up a year ago but during lockdown we’ve never had a chance to test it out under normal conditions. I’m almost anxious about taking the van back on to the road but, on the other hand, it’s spring and I’ve got a year’s botanising to catch up with. I think I’ll get back to grasses and try to identify the early risers. Goodness why I find it so exciting to know the latin name of a clump of anonymous green stuff with almost invisible flowers – but I do, and yes, Madame finds it inexplicable as well. Glory be! a new book on UK grasses is on its way to me and I’ve already polished the hand lens (this is not a euphemism). It’s called “Grasses A Guide to Identification Using Vegetative Characters” published by the Field Studies Council – end of plug, except to mention that you can get it from the NHBS bookshop which carries an amazing collection of titles on every aspect of natural history, and not so much as a third cousin seven times removed has links to them.
Finally, I’m publicly registering my ferocious dislike for any newspaper or magazine article headed “Ten top ****” I remember one of the chief reporters on a local paper telling me once that most journalists are irredeemably lazy and the best way of getting your copy into print is to do the job for them. A whole industry has grown up around this character defect; it’s called lobbying – and/or – dare I say – influencing in which winsome young people earn money by making videos of themselves promoting various kinds of snake oil. These videos readily supply ten best anything stories about anything from parma ham to windscreen wipers. In this way I was provoked by a “ten best” on the subject of growing veg.
As a potter, way back, I was often penalized for my passionate interest in technique. Somehow a whole generation of art schools managed to make a distinction between “technique” – which you had technicians for; and “talent”. The outcome of this lamentable attitude was that many students completed their degree courses without the least idea of how the elements of their pieces were conceived of and built, and how they all fitted together to make a finished piece. I remember visiting a degree show where I spotted a glaze that I’d designed as a favour to the technician in that department. The student, not knowing me from Adam, was astounded when I gave her the outline of the recipe. The very best students had a firm grasp of technique as well as the creative competence to carry out their ideas.
This need for technique applies just as much to gardening or cooking as it does to ceramics, and one thing I’ve learned over the years by watching really inspirational potters, gardeners and chefs is that there are always more and different ways of achieving what they’re doing. Being trapped by any sort of ten best ideology is like handing over your brains to a stranger. I’m miles too old and ugly to be a persuader but I’ve been tempted. However I’m constrained by the terrifying thought that someone might have been so impressed by my fluent and articulate promotion of camembert cheese as a rat bait that they actually bought shares in in a cheese company and created an online rat bait outlet with its own logo.
I remind myself of Ernest Hemingway’s comment to his daughter that the purpose of education is to teach us to recognise bullshit. I would hate to think that my epitaph might read “Dave Pole – he couldn’t tell shit from pudding!” – so please pay no attention at all to anything I write. My life is a work in progress – until it’s not.
