This little fella – I know he’s a ‘he’ because the females are all black has taken to spending his nights in the keyhole of our allotment shed and I’ve had to chuck him out two or three times in order to get the key in to open up. We were talking about planting more bee attractors on the plot, and now we’ve made up our minds to plant some Lungwort – Pulmonaria, and more Comfrey because the old plants have expired. This bee isn’t a communal bee but a solitary one; however apparently he occasionally gets into a gathering rather like Ivy bees do. I owe this ID to Alvan, a fellow musketeer, but I’m desperately trying to avoid getting into bees because at least flowers stay still while I photograph them, and I find that entomologists and lepidopterists can go into a faraway place where their eyes swivel independently in order not to miss anything.
Anyway, any interesting botanical expeditions have been delayed while we get the allotment up to speed. You’ll notice that the tomatoes in our polytunnel are all carrying commercial labels, but before you toss your head scornfully, we moved over to commercial grafted plants a couple of years ago because they are completely blight resistant and much higher yielding. The grafted aubergines which we also buy are sitting atop a rootstock as thick as a pencil already. We are already looking forward to the summer crops. The potatoes are peeping above their ridges; the Chard leaves are enormous but delicious and the fruit trees and bushes are almost finished flowering. Our two resident robins are so fat from following us around as we work that they can barely take off and fly back to their nestlings. Despite the awful weather of the past months, nature has her hand on the tiller once more, it seems.
Last Saturday we had a local field trip around Victoria Park and the Botanical Gardens and we spotted these Three Cornered Garlic plants which thrive around here having evaded border control whilst migrating from the Mediterranean. Elsewhere in the UK they’re harder to find – but I think they’re absolutely beautiful and deserve to be spared by foragers. In Cornwall whole hedgerows have been stripped of Ramsons – Wild Garlic – by commercial foragers. Which reminds me – as it’s peak St George’s Mushroom season – that although they’re generally promoted as safe I’ve met two people, both highly experienced mycologists, who developed symptoms of poisoning after twenty or thirty years of eating them safely. Some plants and fungi contain some pretty nasty accumulative toxins so please do be careful. If there’s a scintilla of doubt in your mind, don’t eat it!
Madame wielding the rake with the Couch grass growling just outside.
I see from the newspapers that the national potato crop is in trouble again. On our way back up from Mendip last week we took the motorway and passed two heavy tractors attempting to plough a couple of sodden, clay rich fields on the Somerset Levels. The resulting mess was disturbing as it combined the pointless destruction of the soil with the consumption of a lot of diesel fuel. The grass pasture on either side of the hedges was looking green and fine. A bit wet for grazing, maybe, due to the probability of poaching the ground, but nonetheless recoverable. How anyone can claim that this terrible unseasonable weather is not connected to climate breakdown angers me. The Guardian reported that this is potentially the smallest potato crop since the last crisis in – wait for it – 2020. Separating out two events four years apart as if they were random acts of god, and seen in the light of record breaking temperatures with crazy winds and rainfall. In my book that’s not two short crises but one long one. Figures of speech like ploughing on make themselves ridiculous first and then redundant soon afterwards.
So I was almost pleased to see that George Monbiot had written a piece in the Guardian on beef farming. I say “almost” because almost every time I read his pieces I find they make me crosser and crosser. Here’s a writer who – on the face of it – should be a firm supporter of campaigns to de-intensify farming but instead completely loses the plot and shrieks at potential allies like a fundamentalist preacher. He starts badly enough by insisting that anyone who fails to agree with him must be the victim of some kind of sinister neuro linguistic programming conspiracy. Not, you see, someone who has also done their best to examine the facts and come to a different conclusion. Having sawn any possible objections off at the knees (a non vegan metaphor I’m afraid but I can’t find a comprehensible alternative); he then goes on to attack regenerative farming by claiming there is no acceptable (that’s a key qualification) scientific evidence to back any of its claims. Here’s a little bit of incontestable evidence that should encourage Monbiot to decide whose side he’s on.
Jeremy Padfield and his business partner Rob Addicott, farm about 1000 acres of the land under Higher Level Stewardship Agreements of which 80 acres are specifically conservation managed for wildlife. Their combined Duchy farms became LEAF demonstration farms in 2006. Over subsequent years soil organic matter averages out at around 5%; no insecticides have been used within the last 5 years; weed killing is targeted only reactively; antibiotic use has been reduced by 58% and plastic use is down by 60%. Minimum tillage leads to a 68% drop in fuel consumption; water is intensively managed and stored, and solar energy meets much of the needs of the farm buildings. As well as wider wildlife field margins, Stratton Farms have been experimenting with skylark plots and wide strips of wildflowers and companion plants sown through the crops. Additionally, 20 acres of trees and 2000 metres of hedgerow have been planted.Â
Notes on an indoor meeting of the Bath Natural History Society, written by me.
This isn’t, by the way, a kind of bucolic lament for the blue remembered hills. They achieve this by using extremely high tech equipment and it’s that convergence of scientific know-how with boots on the ground that makes these farms profitable. Monbiot, on the other hand takes up what I like to think of as the Amos Starkadder position. I sometimes think he’s got a bit of an Old Testament prophet in him; possibly a new Jeremiah – I suspect he’d like to think of himself as a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness; but in the end he’s always going to be Amos Starkadder – the fundamentalist preacher to the Quivering Brethren in Stella Gibbons’ lovely 1930’s novel Cold Comfort Farm. Amos Starkadder was unable to distinguish between the sins a bunch of small-time village dwellers and the inhabitants of Dante’s inferno. I’m always delighted, by the way, that Dante enlisted the first circle of hell for the eternal punishment of those people whose sin was not to give a shit!
Anyway the price of separating Amos from his flock was a small Ford van to travel the country and trouble thousands of moderately innocent souls who might once have cast a lustful glance in the direction of the squire’s son. or daughter (oh go on then, wife)! and then worried too much about it. George Monbiot makes the sixth form debating society’s error of allowing the perfect to drive out the good. Far from encouraging small and achievable gains to fight climate destruction, he treats a 30 acre mixed smallholding as identical to 50,000 head of cattle in a gigantic American feedlot, and then denounces the both of them with his shrill rhetoric. The thought of going after the biggest threat first seems not to cross his mind, which suggests to me that his views on farming are -to misuse an old Marxist term – overdetermined by a prior commitment to veganism and the memory of an unsuccessful attempt to live the rural life in Wales. He implied that the farmers didn’t take to him and the locals treated him rather dismissively in Welsh! How very dare they! They’re all dammed!
The haunting premonition of a vegan future leaves me shivering amidst 100.000,000 lonely wind lashed trees surrounded by huge industrialised vegetable farms and stainless gloop tanks all operated by (who else?) Monsanto and Cargill. I’m not badly disposed towards veganism, but I’m in no sense attracted by it. We’re walking up in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) this week and the local pub does excellent faggots at half the price of the cheapest steaks. The slaughterhouse is a ten minute drive away. There’s a lesson in sustainable living, somewhere in there.
But finally I want to draw your attention to the quality of the allotment earth. It’s been mollycoddled, sheeted , hoed and fed for nearly 8 years now, during which time it’s changed from intractable and shallow alluvial clay and stones to deep, black, friable soil. The 10X4 beds that took a week to clear of couch grass and nettles when we took the plot on can now be shallow tilled in a few minutes. Of course it’s not going to save the earth, but there are probably 300 allotments on the whole site and half a dozen sites in Bath. Every day we see bicycles delivering organic veg to cafes and restaurants around the town and regenerative farms getting going everywhere. So I’ll end with a question. Hi George do you really believe that all this is a waste of time and a greenwashing campaign by shadowy industrial finance? Is it all a distraction? or have you been out eating too much rich spring grass and got blown.
Tall Ramping Fumitory – Fumaria bastardii, var hibernica
Everything about the name of this wildflower is correct. It is tall, it’s ramping and it’s definitely a Fumitory. It’s also quite rare in this part of the world and in order to get the ID verified as correct, I had to take it to the national expert. If there are any other Fumaria experts out there who think that’s wrong then please write and I’ll find ripping it out by the handful in our polytunnel less ethically challenging, because the thing is – however tall and rare it may be, the ramping bit of the description is a problem for us. It sets seed prolifically and spreads like wildfire tangling itself rather weakly through our vegetables which makes it very hard to weed out. It started out as a single plant one plot up from us on a path next to a compost heap and it caught my eye. By the next season it had spread to one of our beds and now it’s competing with the Chickweed that also grows prolifically after the beds are cleared in the autumn. We would normally have covered the beds in the polytunnel to suppress weed growth but last autumn we had a bit of a punt with ultra early potatoes broad beans and carrots and so the beds were left uncovered. Apart from the beans, neither potatoes or carrots grew at all and the weeds had free range to strut their stuff. We’ve now had three years of different crops terminally weakened by what I now feel happy to call a weed and Madame rebelled against any protective thoughts I might have been secretly harbouring and so I reasoned that there was no form of weeding short of chemicals or a flame gun that would effectively kill the seeds. Flame guns and polytunnels or nets are not a good combination. And so my plan is simply to fight back by hand weeding, knowing that the process is inefficient enough to keep a few field botanists happy for decades whilst allowing us to grow some crops.
Allotments aren’t always well tended, and weed invasions – whether underground; Bindweed, Creeping thistle, and Couch grass – or by air; Dandelion, Willowherb or by human transfer, the infamous allotmenteers boot with plants like Fumaria – are always a danger’ especially on organic plots. Nature abhors a vacuum and bare earth can be seen from Mars especially if you’re a weed looking for a comfortable and well fed berth. I’m quite sure that one of the biggest reasons for new gardeners giving up their plots is when they leave them in October looking pristine and then in February and March return to an unmanageable jungle. The other reason is probably pigeon attacks. This year we lost much of our purple sprouting crop to a pigeon who managed to crawl in under the nets and then get trapped. We probably spend far more time dealing with weeds than we do sowing and harvesting. We don’t dig unless we really have to remove Bindweed for example.
It’s been an awful beginning to the new season and our plots are still sodden. Even the soil in the polytunnel is wet due to an underground stream running deep beneath it. However the warmest and wettest February could easily be followed by an April heatwave in this unpredictable age of approaching climate disaster. But we’re back with dirt under our nails and with aching backs. It’s good to feel better, but six months of fretting about AF has taken its toll on my confidence and I’ve been approaching physical tasks with my foot on the brakes. I haven’t felt like me at all until quite recently, and all the advice I’ve had is just don’t overdo it – what does that mean when it’s at home? (Sorry that’s a bit of a local phrase).
So there we are – onwards and upwards, but not too far we hope. The campervan is fixed and we’ve got places to go.
I suppose most of us can remember our first view of a Red Kite – ours was, predictably, whilst driving on the A470 past the Red Kite feeding station in Rhayader. The folks who pioneered the return of this lovely bird deserve all our thanks. Now they’re spreading across the country and we see them regularly in Bath and east of Bristol. On Saturday on our drive up to the Lleyn peninsula we took a back road across the hills beyond Rhayader where we have often seen them in ones and twos, but we were completely taken aback at a flock of maybe fifty birds massing like seagulls behind a plough and swirling noisily in the air. It passed through my mind that either a new – and in my mind unnecessary – feeding station had opened up; or that there was a dead elephant at the very least lying there somewhere. The truth, though announced itself with a horrible putrid smell and explained the excitement. They were gathered over a large waste disposal site which we thought had been closed and capped but which looked and smelt as if the recent rains had flooded and possibly even ruptured the covers. There were pools of water everywhere; a hazard to local watercourses but paradise to a flock of hungry, or more likely greedy scavenging birds.
We look at vultures with distaste and suspicion because of their feeding habits and I wonder how long it will be before a campaign against the Red Kite ‘menace‘ will leak out of the same filthy mess. As we know to our cost in Bath, rats and gulls will take the easiest available food source and if that happens to be human rubbish then that’s what they’ll have. In Bath we even have bilingual signs on the rubbish bins urging tourists to dispose of their leftover takeaways properly – although it seems a bit rich to have them only in English and French. Are the French more inclined to dump their leftovers in the street than other nationalities? – of course not! I suppose in a perfectly ordered ecosystem, the Kites would eschew the rotting burgers and concentrate on eating only rats but in the real world once an ecosystem has been disrupted the consequences simply cannot be predicted. Think of the consequences of introducing myxomatosis into the rabbit population, and of doing the same thing with freeing mink into the wild, releasing grey squirrels and of course allowing Muntjac deer to escape. Farm subsidies, along with the Common Agricultural Policy have skewed the whole food economy in favour of intensive farming for decades and we’re only just beginning to understand at what cost. The unpalatable truth is that in every case the disruption was caused by human intervention. “We have seen the enemy, it is us!” Red Kites prefer to eat carrion – dead flesh and roadkill, and were so efficient at clearing the filth from medieval streets they were protected by law.
Aside from that depressing episode we also passed a number of farms showing “No farmers no food” banners. I can totally understand why farmers with poor quality marginal hill farms are struggling at the moment, but even a quick look at the organisation pushing the campaign would show that it isn’t being funded and promoted by farmers but by rather shadowy and wealthy climate deniers and extreme right pundits who have no interest in the welfare or survival of farms here in Wales. This is one of those covert populist campaigns that spreads utterly daft ideas such as green campaigners are forcing us all to eat insects. What can’t be denied is that the Government is so much in hock to agribusiness and big energy, they’ve totally rolled over to the climate denial lobbyists. This is industrial strength ignorance and stupidity and we know it – and farmers would do well to refuse to have anything to do with it because if the No farmers no food gains traction the only beneficiaries would be the oil and agribusiness industry and the hill farmers will be thrown under a bus.
The underlying theme of the new subsidy scheme is public money for public goods. The Conservative government is now brain dead, bereft of ideas and capable only of pleasuring the biggest landowners. None of the major parties, to my knowledge, has come up with a plausible plan for farmers across the whole spectrum from hill to fen which is regenerative; sustainable and working within a market with its greedy exploitative ethos brought under control, and so if the Labour Party hope to run the show they’ll have to come up with something concrete for farmers to vote for. Any footballer knows that the easiest way to run in a goal is to get the opposition divided.
Aside from the polemic, there are dangers which I know have been recognised by Welsh farmers but which are easily buried under culture war rhetoric. In Wales the more isolated areas are also strongholds for the Welsh language and if the population falls below a certain level, the language will disappear. Why should that worry anyone? It worries me because a language, any language, is a kind of cultural DNA. All of Welsh experience and history is encoded within the language and allowing it to die is a tragedy at the level of burning the library at Alexandria in AD 48, and which was all the more poignant because it was said that the fire was the unforeseen consequence of Julius Caesar’s order to burn the ships in the harbour. But this isn’t a plea for a handful of academics to be given access to the language. It’s the language of RS Thomas’s imagined hill farmer Iago Prytherch, and the language of William Williams of Pantycelyn, and the language of the local butcher and the youngsters who served us our Guinness in the bar today. With a language you can write and say and even think some thoughts that are not encoded in any other tongue. Languages are the glue that holds communities together and introduce the memories and experience of the old to the young . Destroying a whole way of life is a terrible crime – so the plight of these farmers demands our fullest possible attention and the kind of policies that uphold the best and most sustainable practices, supported by clear and reliable subsidies. Demonising farmers as backward looking luddites on the one hand, or sending them off to block motorways on a false prospectus are both dead ends.
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.
Floodwater makes a strange and almost haunting sound; all the more frightening for being relatively quiet. This is water at its most dangerous, the point where it seems to assume a malevolent personality. The waves and pulses – yes, the river seems to pulse – whisper quietly to one another – they plan, they finger the banks as if they were looking for weaknesses; they race past me faster than a decent runner could manage . Imagine the sibilance of a flock of roosting starlings with the volume turned down; busy, organised and purposeful. The swans have decamped to a newly made lake among the houses opposite. With both towpaths flooded and impassable, we residents gather in small knots at the end of the terrace to watch, take photographs and peer upwards through the leafless trees and watch a police helicopter hovering overhead, praying that there’s no lost soul tumbling lifelessly along the scoured river bed.
It seems to have rained every day for over a month. Monsoon quantities of water soaking the ground and washing thousands of tons of impoverished soil into the river. The old floodgates have become cranky and unreliable and there’s even talk about removing them altogether because the Council have invested millions in a new flood relief scheme which works by storing the overflowing water among terraces which they hope will be filled with shoppers thronging a new retail centre in the summer. I spoke to a council worker early this morning who told me that the previous record height at the spot we were standing was 5.5m. Today it was 5.1m and rising. Maybe someone miscalculated, I wondered, with all these new build blocks of studio flats with a handsome premium for river frontage – maybe a river frontage in the midst of a climate catastrophe is like a ringside seat at an earthquake. Maybe an underground carpark below river level is tempting a providence that’s turning bad on us. Who even knows where we go from here?
This is not an act of god, this is an act of revenge for the raging stupidity of those who caused the problem. Last night on local television we learned that some SUV drivers had been driving at speed down flooded streets – because they could – creating bow waves that washed away the householders’ sandbags and caused their houses to flood. Words fail me.
So as the title suggests, this week saw a return to the present after reconnecting my heart and my head on the subject of the walk from Le Puy en Velay to Cahors. The sediment has now settled just about enough to view it as just another few yards of life’s rich tapestry. I was pleased and rather surprised to discover that it was pretty good in parts, and I’d go so far as to say that working on the timeline through my journal and photographs as well as my memory was as cathartic and helpful as the counsellors often say.
On Sunday we laid on a family meal. With two of the boys missing it was smaller than usual. Our grandchildren arrived as high as kites – suspect sugar rushes – and our son was – as is often the case – rather withdrawn. We know pretty much why he’s in a bad place but because he’s never spoken to us about it, or invited any kind of help, it remains the elephant in the room and makes everyone a bit sad. Oh and caution stayed my hand with the sherry bottle (the children had their own alcohol free version) and it failed to reach the heavenly heights of Jill’s recipe which comprised (I may have increased the booze) – one sponge and one bottle of sherry.
However on Monday and after ten years, our daughter in law was finally granted British citizenship and there were whoop whoops galore on the family WhatsApp group. No more tasteless jokes about Australian cricket, then, but we will expect her to learn Bristolian as soon as possible. Then of course we spent a couple of mornings catching up on the allotment. If you’ve read this blog/journal for any length of time you’ll know how depressing I find the autumn. It’s like visiting a loved one who’s rapidly fading away. But Madame administers the whip adroitly and once I get going I usually enjoy it – ish! I am not going “gently into that good night” and every arthritic creak makes me froth with rage at the dying of the light. I normally love wheelbarrowing muck and hoeing weeds in, but ever since I was formally diagnosed with AF and given a pile of drugs to limit my heart rate and blood pressure, I suffer from a nagging panic about making myself ill. I couldn’t fault the doctors, they’ve been wonderful, but all they’ll say is “just don’t overdo it” . Just WTF is the difference between doing it and overdoing it? and do you have to wait until you’re in the mortuary with a label tied to your toe to find out??
Tuesday was spent on the allotment, until we were driven off by the rain. This has been a record breaking autumn with low pressure driving rain off the Atlantic and dropping devastating amounts across the country. I don’t understand the wingnuts who still think this weather falls within the normal.
On Wednesday I went off with two friends, prospecting possible sites for Bath Natural History Society to organise field trips next year. We had three sites to look at. The first had to be abandoned after our driver was forced to reverse 100 yards down a lane with a locked gate at the end and no turning place. It was very narrow, half flooded on one side and a ditch on the other – both sides within easy reach of the wheels. After a great waving of arms and shouting we half extracted ourselves noisily enough to attract the attention of the farmer’s daughter who came and took over having obviously done it many times before. She told me she would have offered to reverse the car herself but had thought her offer might offend us. I thought there was an element of sweet revenge in it. The combined intelligence of three old blokes failing to drive a car backwards was far too good an opportunity to miss for a young woman in 2023. It was only later that I realized what a daft thing it was to tell her we were natural historians; who on earth would know what that meant? Anything else could get confused with naturists; and nature lovers sounds thoroughly creepy. “No dear we always keep our wellies on” comes to mind. So what? ….. botanists? bird watchers, fungus hunters? all three I suppose. In the end it sounded more comprehensible to say we were organising nature rambles for a club.
Site number two also lacked sufficient parking although we managed to squeeze in around the back among the builders’ wagons. Most of the site was pretty unimpressive from a wildlife point of view but once we got beyond the lake we could see that great efforts had been made to create a real wildlife area. My companions, who were both birders, got excited about a pair of Scoters and surprisingly they spotted six or seven species, but there wasn’t enough, we thought, to maintain interest for more than an hour or so.
Site number three was by far the largest and most interesting in spite of being surrounded by houses, roads, an industrial estate and a railway line. There was an abundance of hedge and scrub – enough to hold a big population of birds. There was a wooded area, a stream and a lake plus a couple of large and relatively unimproved fields where we soon started to find waxcap fungi. We were all trying out various apps on our phones and at one point all three of us were using Merlin – an excellent bird ID app- pointing our phones at a noisy flock of Starlings. The apps parted company over the fungi – none of them (the apps that is) – are perfect and fungi in particular mostly need double checking in the books – for many you even need to resort to a microscope and examine the spores. So an affable exchange of emails later in the day got us as close as we could. But we came home with at least one suggestion for a trip next year. I’ve been volunteered to co-lead another in the spring and give a talk as well so things are looking up.
Thursday and Friday were swallowed up by the allotment again, but at last it’s beginning to look a bit decent. We covered all except two of the beds that were cleared of crops, and we’ve sown seeds for overwintering in the polytunnel. On Saturday we finally had our first NHS dental appointment after 7 years and 63 phone calls. No-one would take us on as patients for all that time and so our teeth weren’t properly looked after and when Madame’s gold crown fell out I tried to mend it by glueing it back in. Unfortunately I glued it back to front. It cost well over £1000 to get it fixed. The only tiny cloud in the heavens was the fact that the dentist called us both “My dear” throughout.
Then yesterday we were off to Tetbury with our neighbour Charlie who is an ex Director of the Welsh National Botanical Gardens and is an all-round good guy. We were invited along to a joint talk he was doing with Louise, a dyer; all about the trees and plants that are used for dying fabrics which is a subject close to my heart, and also having lunch with Geoffrey, the owner of the 28 acre site, the gardener (Louise’s husband Liam) and Charlie.
A splendid Pestle puffball – Lycoperdon excipuliformis beneath a group of Oaks.
It was a wonderful but challenging and occasionally perplexing visit to the Makara Centre near Tetbury. The cost of running it is subsidised by hosting weddings as well as a memorial garden, but you get the feeling that its real purpose is as a place of meditation, teaching and personal growth. The whole place is suffused by a contemplative atmosphere and outside there were a dozen places where you might sit quietly and meditate. There were many little water features completely naturalized with moss and ferns. But inside the main buildings were some of the most lovely human spaces I’ve ever seen. Dotted with mandalas and statues, and furnished and decorated with enormous care; there was one room in which I’d gladly sit alone for a day. Even the door frames were beautiful.
The man who goes out for revenge should dig two graves
Confucius
But finally the big think. I’ve been agonising about how to think about this appalling war in Israel/Palestine and it seems to me (after 2 weeks of violent thoughts, dreams – and frothing at the mouth on my part) that even using a term like evil presupposes that the user of the word accepts that it represents something real; not just a metaphor that gets wheeled out for press headlines. As a concept in everyday use in the West, evil has all but disappeared along with much of its supporting philosophy but we still think it’s significant enough to use on especially upsetting occasions. And, of course, all the major religions including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Buddhism – virtually all of them – separate good acts from evil acts. I’ve worked in many challenging situations and evil – when you encounter it – is utterly chilling; a trashing of every virtue; a deliberate choice for wickedness and against goodness. Surely this is a timely moment to examine our own acts; to accept our own capacity for evil and to recognise when we have fallen into it. If governments, militias, terrorists across the world chose to read their own scriptures on the subject of evil – prayerfully – and assess their own acts in the light of the scriptures they claim to follow then I’m hopeful that they would at least (grudgingly) recognise their error. There is no conceivable God worth a moment of anyone’s time – let alone obedience – who would sanction or encourage evil acts. So we can’t have it both ways. It’s hard to make a coherent argument concerning evil unless we allow that it’s a possibility for any of us, and therefore we have to accept our responsibility for the evil we do without excusing ourselves on the basis of some utterly wrong and self serving interpretation of scripture. Then; when, and only when we’ve acknowledged our own capacity for evil should we turn our attention to what the enemy is doing. I have never forgotten a sentence from my ordination sermon, preached by Francis Palmer: “Always remember that the Church can be the devil – and when it thinks it can’t be, it is!” A very old and dear friend who spent a part of the Second World War serving on the North Atlantic convoys, defending vital cargo ships against aerial and torpedo bombing, told me that on one occasion they were dive bombed whilst he was on duty as a machine gunner. He told me how, to his great shame he was so filled with hatred as he poured deadly shells at the plane, he felt he somehow changed into a monster. He was still deeply ashamed at this revelation of his deep nature fifty years later.
And here was the most unexpected outcome of our day at Makara – a sense of release and peace against all the anxieties and fears of the present moment. We talked for hours about it last night, and again this morning but couldn’t define what exactly was happening there, but this morning we went up to the allotment to clear another two beds and it started to rain; not a bit of drizzle but biblical rain roaring down on us and we laughed as we struggled to work on; digging our winter potatoes from the sodden ground. I could brag about how successful our efforts at improving the soil have been in improving drainage, but that wasn’t the point. We were just laughing about earth and rain and hard work and potatoes; the least glamorous or religious activity you could imagine. When Charlie was trying to explain what Makara meant to him he said “The place has got a soul”. He’s been deeply involved in the development of the place for years, and he and Geoffrey are old friends. Well, he wasn’t wrong.
Quite a busy week really. Retirement is not for the faint hearted !
Transhumance is about as ancient activity as human culture itself, and being so ancient means that it’s encoded with a wealth of cultural meaning. The cattle or sheep and indeed goats are moved up to mountainous grasslands where there are rich wildflower pastures that cattle understand and select from. These cows were the happiest and healthiest I’d ever seen.
Typically unprepared we hadn’t grasped that the late night drinking and music were connected to an event – transhumance – which may be associated in these parts of France with Pentecost, bearing in mind that Pentecost, being linked to Easter, and consequently linked to the first full moon after the equinox has a bit of a six week wander around the calendar from year to year. Pasture, on the other hand, pays no attention to such cultural frills and will burst into life when the weather and daylight conditions are right; so as we are discovering on the allotment year by year – spring is driven by weather and pays no heed to gardeners’ and farmers’ careful plans.
So let’s imagine that there is a solemn congregation of pastoralists in Aumont Aubrac that – after a long meal and a good deal of roughish wine – each year decide when the animals will be moved to the hill pastures whereupon plans are made, cellars stocked and musicians booked for the parties in the local villages. The huge circular stone watering ponds that speak of bigger flocks and better days are checked and the best animals are selected for a bit of dressing up.
Because, of course the transhumance isn’t just about good husbandry; it encodes meaning, history, poetry and relationships . In the way of these things, it’s important because it encodes a whole bunch of stuff that the governments of the day – or indeed the landowners – may not be so keen on. Oliver Cromwell was at least right in the reason he gave for banning music, carol singing, Christmas and dancing which were dangerous to the powerful because they embodied that thread of life-giving energy that gives the marginalised people of the earth hope for better things. And so these ancient festivals are greeted with suspicion by the powerful because they simply don’t get it. On the downside there’s a lot of potential for these ancient festivals to become overwhelmed by extreme right populists who feed on the anger of the marginalized whilst stoking up anger for their own reasons which are rarely to improve the lives of the poor. I remember well the St Paul’s riots in Bristol when the extreme right laid on a coach to take the local Southmead lads – who had a well deserved reputation for flaring up and rioting – down to St Pauls. I was working in Southmead as a community artist and I knew them all well. But they refused point blank to get on the bus because they saw immediately that this was not about St Pauls and neither would it help Southmead but an obvious attempt to use them to stir up trouble. I’m pretty sure that, had they got on the bus, there would have been photographers from the right wing press waiting at the other end to photograph them as they got off it. On another occasion our local community policeman came to see me with an inspector in tow after a flare up on the estate. The inspector – not a sympathetic man – said that it was the worst riot he’d ever seen in Southmead. Henry, the community policeman reprimanded him and said “that wasn’t a riot it was a carnival!” It reminds me of the time a bunch of Hell’s Angels turned up at a local village and behaved themselves impeccably. Then reporters from the News of the Screws turned up and offered them £1000 to kill one of Lord Methuen’s peacocks – an offer which they politely declined. Well perhaps not politely!
Anyway, to return to Aumont Aubrac; aside from the noisy parties and the menacing drunks passing our little tents we had no idea what was going on and so the photographs I took of the herding of the cattle were taken from half a mile away. They’re at the top of this piece and you can – if you inspect the photo carefully -see that some of the cattle are decorated with a French Tricolour (see above) and some with less potent symbols. We only noticed them at all because of the clanging of their bells, and the sound of some kind of band coming up behind, and I’m pleased to say that no government officials were harmed in the course of the transhumance – any sore heads were most likely self-inflicted.
But there was another transhumance going on at the same time; the relentless passage of pilgrims in search of some other kind of rich pasture but nonetheless inspired by the ancient culture of pilgrimage. Some, very few, were doing it the old way but others, and I suspect that this group of walkers is one of them, were making use of the huge infrastructure that’s grown up around the pilgrimage. Transit vans, cheap (not that cheap) beds for a night and basic food every day.
Since I didn’t have any idea why I was there it would have been churlish to take a position on their efforts. One person in particular has stuck in my mind. He was German and with our Serbian translator’s help, we discovered that he was walking from Rome to Santiago and picking up a stone at every place he slept. His wife, in Berlin, was dying from cancer and this was his desperate supplication to save her life. Sometimes crazy and beautiful flow together in the same stream and I hope, against hope, that he was choosing small enough stones to get there and big enough stones to impress God.
A lovely day at Dyrham Park with the Grandchildren and their mum. We’ve pretty much got used to the absence of the deer since it was culled due to so many animals being infected with TB. But the knock on effect of their absence is obvious when you compare the photo in the header with the one below. Firstly, of course we notice the much more ragged look of the avenue of Lime trees today. The header shows how closely cropped the lower branches used to be, and the avenue had a formal, clipped quality that led the eye forward. Elsewhere, the change in grazing has allowed the coarser grasses to take over because, sadly, mowing cannot replicate grazing as a means of improving grassland diversity. Let’s be fair, if you know where to look the variety of grass species is (so far) about the same but it’s consigned to smaller areas.
July 2019
Today the two figures are the mothers of the figures in the header – Madame on the left and our lovely daughter in law on the right. But there’s good news too. It’s been hard to get any official information about the return of the deer herd; but today we discovered – by talking to a couple of friendly volunteers – that there are plans to restore the herd some time next year. We’d noticed that there’s been a continuing programme of installing high fences around the park. In our helpful conversation we discovered that the fencing is not so much about keeping the Dyrham Park deer in but keeping the wild (possibly infected) deer out. The badgers in the park have all been trapped vaccinated and released, and soon – we know not when – a new herd will be brought in. Hooray!
Common grasshopper
For today our grandkids hunted grasshoppers, spotted buzzards and we were able to talk to them about wildlife.
Back home we’re up to our necks in produce; processing tomatoes for the winter, for instance. I’m completely knackered!
This could be a bit of a shaggy dog story so I’ll keep it short. On Thursday last the steam oven packed up; not just no steam but no oven at all. The engineer can’t make it until Monday afternoon, but that’s just the beginning because he’ll have to order the parts and we could be without our main oven for ten days. But all’s not lost because we have a combination oven/grill/microwave and we also have a very elderly bread machine. Over the years I’ve tried every idea in the book for ways of making steam including saucers of water and wet bricks but none come close to the real thing.
So no sourdough for maybe ten days and yesterday I fetched out the jar of dried yeast and made a quick machine loaf – the resultant brick on the right was the clearest sign that the yeast had effectively died – it doesn’t last forever and I bought a kilo of the only yeast available in the panic days of the first lockdown. This morning I bought new yeast and the difference is clear – which doesn’t mean the bread machine is anything other than a quick work around in an emergency. I know without even cutting a slice that it will be fluffy and tasteless, but it makes half decent toast. The shame is that we’re right in the middle of processing tomatoes and this will limit our capacity.
Our neighbour on the allotment has just lost much of her tomato crop to blight. When we get a wet spell like the one we’ve been enduring here, it’s only a matter of days before blight appears and it’s a tragedy. This has been a truly weird season and it’s impossible to believe that the cause is anything but the oncoming climate catastrophe. Food security is one aspect of the crisis that’s not mentioned nearly enough.
But I’m also more directly affected by air pollution than most because I’m asthmatic. It was never a problem until we moved to Bath, but the air here can be so poor that I could barely walk to the surgery. One of the health factors that is affected particularly by microscopic particles is atrial fibrillation which, for me has intensified from occasional to continuous, and the polluting particles aren’t just from the burning of diesel fuel. Very heavy vehicles like diesel SUV’s obviously emit copious amounts, but it’s also been demonstrated that because electric vehicles are so much heavier they emit more particles from tyres and brakes. Children are ten times more likely to be killed or seriously injured if struck by SUV’s as opposed to smaller cars. When children – more often poor children are exposed to pollution their lungs never grow properly. I mention this because Bath is infested with these giant vehicles, often carrying just one driver. So the argument that ULEZ and 20mph speed limits are restricting some kind of human right is so obviously wrong that continuing to advance it is the exact equivalent to promoting cigarette smoking among children. Who stands to gain from this? Big oil, and car manufacturers, that’s who.
I remember the headline from a column in the Daily Mirror when I was a child, written by William Connor whose ferocious articles appeared under his pen name Cassandra. It was “This Septic Isle”. What goes around comes around!
