Tag: climate change

Look we actually found a maypole!

We discovered this Maypole rather hidden away in a glade above the terraces at Dyrham Park

On tuesday our grandchildren’s school was shut for a teachers strike, and it was the tail end of a NHS nurses strike. As it happens, our grand daughter was booked in for some reconstructive orthopaedic surgery on her foot; notwithstanding any strikes (which incidentally we fully support). Her operation was carried out without delay or problems and she was home again by tea time, grumpy but hopefully fixed. As we drove past their school with the other two I tooted at the pickets who waved back cheerfully at the sight of two of their young students out for a day trip with granny and grandad.

Dyrham Park is close and (for National Trust members) cheap and the children love the freedom to race about and build dams in the streams. No-one has ever objected to them so we let them get on with it. Of course they also get a free natural history lesson – here are a couple of St Mark’s flies we photographed while they were mating. They’re the dozy black flies with dangly legs that seem not to mind flying into you – which makes them faintly scary to some people. They’re called St Mark’s because they emerge from their burrows in the grass in their tens of thousands in late April around the feast of St Mark; who – if you’re not a Christian and a full-on churchgoer – probably means nothing at all. On Tuesday they were present in many hundreds of thousands. We also hunted for St George’s mushrooms without luck (I’ve already made the point about saints days!) and enjoyed the peak dandelion period. We saw Cuckoo flowers, Maidenhair ferns and Harts Tongues. We talked about everything we saw and taught them to listen for birdsong and how to use a mobile phone app called “Merlin” to help identify them. Oh and we talked about the way barley straw is used to clear murky ponds and found some tadpoles and enjoyed the huge views out towards the Severn and the Mendip Hills. I absolutely defy anyone to say that a family day out is no substitute for a day in school.

Then, wandering around we came across a lonely maypole (this being the day after May Day) but you’ll see that the grass surrounding the pole looks pretty untroubled by even little feet. Clearly we haven’t yet embraced paganism with any enthusiasm in spite of the dark forebodings expressed by the Strict and Particular Brethren.

When we got back the children taught us how to order a Deliveroo from a mobile and then ordered all their favourite things. The oldest said afterwards “We love coming to you because you spoil us!”. So we all learned something new although ours was by far the more expensive lesson.

On Wednesday we were walking back from the allotment when we came across a bunch of people on the A4 protesting about the 20mph speed restrictions, the clean air zone and all things associated with wokery, 5G telephones, vaccinations and communism. Passing motorists tooted their horns enthusiastically without the tiniest thought illuminating their bewildering prejudices. I’m glad to say that the local elections 24 hours later saw the eviction of a raft of councillors who’d campaigned against the clean air zone and the new speed limits. Overwhelmingly the voters of Bath see the virtue of slowing down and breathing unpolluted air. Of course that won’t stop the campaigners (who are associated with all manner of far right causes), from telling us that they know better than we do – what we believe.

Mayday

This photograph of the allotment was taken on May Day 2016, two months after we took it on.

There was me, writing here a few days ago lamenting the absence of what I chose to call cultus; call it what you will really but it’s about moments of communal celebration – and then today it’s May Day.

Not that anything very discernable happened. No maypole to be seen on the allotments; no May Queen, no carousing and drunkenness; no dangerous and profligate behaviour. All you could say was that the allotments today were busier than they’ve been since last autumn. We’ve endured long periods of solitary allotmenteering as winter extended its grip to a full six months and we wondered whether we would ever see the sun again. Now we have two consecutive bank holidays and a coronation and aside from a meet the street gathering here next Sunday it seems that big and boozy community events were dealt something of a death blow by Covid. Somehow we’ve got out of the habit – out of the habit of harvest festivals, Christmas carols, plough mondays, Whitsun; and beating the parish bounds; other flavours are available if you can remember them.

There are probably many who wish good riddance to the lot of them – Christian festivals are a bit passé now – except for the fact that most of the meaningful festivals that still exist were pinched from the pagans centuries ago. Oliver Cromwell did his level best to ban the lot of them but the moment the Restoration happened they emerged from their brief hibernation as full of energy as before.

When St Augustine of Canterbury arrived in Britain in around 597 he discovered that a fully functioning pagan religion had returned in the period since the Romans left. He sent a desperate email – (OK letter!) – asking the Pope what he should do and in one of the few sensible decisions in the history of Christian evangelism; some months later the Pope replied that it was better to take on the pagan buildings and traditions and give them a Christian backstory. Welcome to Plough Monday, the first Monday after the (Christian) feast of the Epiphany – OK then, Twelfth Night – when traditionally the sowing of crops began after the Christmas lockdown. Plough Monday was the pagan festival celebrating the beginning of the agricultural year. In fact there’s an uncanny tie-in between the surviving Christian festivals and the old pagan calendar; and some, like Wassailing, that were never successfully co-opted at all.

All of which is a rather long winded approach to the fact that today, May Day, is also celebrated as Beltane; the traditional festival celebrating the beginning of summer. Fires, singing and a bit of carousing would once have taken place all over the country. I’ve got a photo of my mother as a child (born in 1918) dressed in white, with a garland of flowers round her head and standing next to a ribbon decked maypole on an Oxfordshire village green. Sadly since the triumph of the Evangelicals – Cromwell’s withered soulmates – most of the Christian Churches see these entirely innocent reminders of the earth cycle as heretical if not as devil worship. If you really want to see devil worship go and stand outside the chemical works in Huddersfield that still produces Paraquat and sells it to poor farmers in India.

The point here is that the earth cycles – the solstices, Winter (Christmas); Summer (Midsummer Day); equinoxes; Spring (Easter); Autumn; (Michaelmas) and the intervening quarters; Imbolc (Candlemas); Beltane (May Day); Lughnasadh (Lammas) and Samhain (Halloween) need to be detached from their captivity within institutional Christianity not because I would like to damage what became my own spiritual dialect but because the context has changed; history has moved on and – in the story shaped universe that we created and now inhabit – the earth cycle has (once again) become the story we desperately need to move us away from the dominant narrative – neoliberal economics and politics – towards an earth centred spirituality, not because it feels like a nice idea, but because our lives depend upon it.

So today we were on the allotment. Madame was mulching our fruit bushes with sheep fleeces given to us by our friends NIck and Kate who live in Bannau Brycheiniog – the old and original Welsh name for the Brecon Beacons. We’re expecting a plot inspection any day now and, to be honest, it looks as if a small flock of Jacobs Sheep has died in the fruit cage, under the blackcurrants and gooseberries. Fleece, which is almost valueless these days, makes an excellent mulch and slug repellent and it’s very good as an additive to the compost heap. Anyway we hope we don’t give our neighbours palpitations.

While Madame was engaged with the fruit cage, I was earthing up the potatoes. Years ago I bought a ridging tool which I only ever use once a year but it’s exactly right for earthing up spuds. The soil is black and friable and smells lovely with a bit of sun on it. It’s worth ridging up this time of year because it protects the emerging leaves from a late frost better than fleece, which allows Jack Frost to do his destructive work wherever it touches the leaf.

Everywhere there are signs of growth. The immense energy of spring drives the plants upwards into our realm and as I hoed the soil, I touched, for a moment that sense of sacredness that occasionally visits a gardener in quiet thought. This moment of inspiration was accompanied by a speaking; not at all an auditory hallucination but the clearest intimation that the soil itself is the mother of all life. We might imagine for a moment that those Buddhist monks who rake gravel temple gardens have, somehow, a higher form of spirituality. It’s not true of course. The sacred is always ordinary; the ordinary seeking us out.

But I can’t leave this thought with any suggestion that the paganism which I have referred to here is in any sense inferior, heretical or dangerous. My point in using it is to suggest that its connection with the earth cycle may be an insight whose time has come again. In 1966 First Nation Canadian, Buffy Sainte Marie, released a song called “Little Wheel Spin and Spin” and it just wouldn’t leave me yesterday. You might like to listen to it – it’s on YouTube music. Fifty seven years on it’s as powerful and prophetic as it was when I first heard it.

Christianity has been a rather poor guardian of the ancient traditions it once co-opted. Maybe it’s time to ask for our ball back? Happy Beltane.

A gentle reproach from Wales

October 2022. An absolute whopper from the Marcher Apple Network orchard in Cwmdu – no idea what it’s called.

I should open my Severnsider mailbox more often, I know, but mostly it’s full of technical stuff that I don’t understand – which is why I only found a polite note concerning the proper Welsh spelling of an author I’d written about – it ran – “Not a massive typo – you have Carwyn down as ‘Carwen’ on this post which is the female rendition of the name.” The post, from many months ago was titled “This is beginning to look like my mother’s siege larder” – and I’ve just amended the spelling by placing Carwyn in the correct gender.

Blog posts are ephemeral of course, but books last forever so I thought I’d give Carwyn Graves another plug for his two books; the first was (I think) published in both Welsh and English and it was called “The Apples of Wales”. If you’re at all interested in the innumerable local varieties of apple which result from its promiscuous cross pollinations, then this is a really interesting book offering marvellous insights into the local histories of some of these varieties. And if you’re really interested there’s a whole orchard of Welsh apple varieties behind Plan yn Rhiw on the Lleyn peninsula, and we were also able to visit an orchard at Cwmdu in the Brecon Beacons which was planted by the Marcher Apple Network – a society for reviving old varieties of apples and pears. We’ve planted a number of traditional varieties on the allotment, and our friends in the Beacons have planted many more.

Carwyn Graves’ excellent new book “Welsh Food Stories” is equally engaging and informative, so much so that I was tempted into following up on some of the books he mentions and I’ve managed to buy two or three of them secondhand. So I hope this mention makes up for my inadequate knowledge of the Welsh language; long may it prosper!

Anyway, while I’m in the mood I’ll also mention a piece I stumbled on yesterday called “Failing nature on Dartmoor – why its protected areas are in such poor condition and what needs to be done” by Tony Whitehead, analysing the heated debate on successes and failures in preserving Sites of Special Scientific Interest on farmed land on Dartmoor. It’s a subject that I’ve written about before and it’s been much clouded by misreporting and exaggerated accusations. I won’t attempt to paraphrase it but if you’re interested in getting a better grasp of what’s at stake it’s a really useful summary.

Back on the allotment an instinctive starting pistol was fired over the Easter holiday and the site was swarming with allotmenteers. For once it seemed sensible to be planting the potatoes on Good Friday, and the intoxicating smell of the wet but warming earth – known as petrichor – carried the subliminal message of the season. Is there some kind of spirituality here? – something to do with being held by an embracing framework? Nonetheless, not everyone is as engaged with nature as we are. We were expecting a delivery of plants which eventually turned up yesterday, three parts dead, after sitting in a courier’s warehouse for six days. The boxes were festooned with notices that warned they contained live material.

Now we’re sitting indoors waiting for Storm Noa to pass over while Madame sorts the wheat from the chaff in the seed box. This is such typical spring weather. Southwesterlies laden with moist air bring pulse after pulse of rain and sunshine to us in the west country, gifted by the Atlantic. The warmer the sea gets the more extreme the weather gets.

Life on the edge

Another week on the Lleyn peninsula, at the feet of the Snowdon range and jutting out into the Irish sea. The drive home was an idyllic spring journey through three mountain ranges, Snowdonia, the Cambrians and then the Brecon Beacons. I suppose we could have driven home the quick way via the motorway network but then we’d have missed the superb clear views of the mountains. On one occasion a couple of years ago we took a wrong turn and drove up beside the Arenigs and Lake Bala. It cost us a couple of hours finding our way through the Welsh Marches but it felt as if we were following in George Borrow’s footsteps as he researched for his book “Wild Wales”.

The weather was iffy to say the least, but then it usually is in North Wales, and we found sunshine and time for walking every day – which led to a surprise discovery. Coltsfoot (bottom left) isn’t rare by any means but I haven’t seen it for over a decade. The last occasion was on a bike ride along the Severn estuary when the verges were thinly covered by melting snow. It’s one of those plants which flowers before the leaves emerge and I suspect the contrast of golden yellow against the mud spattered roadside snow caught my eye. I’ve been back to the same place often at this time of the year to see it again, if only because it cheers me up to see it defying the last of winter, rather like Celandines do. It’s possible, though that I haven’t found it because it just wasn’t there – because it’s fussy about its environment, but only in the sense that (like the Twits) it relishes disturbed and unpromising environments like landslides, mudslides disturbed ground and generally mashed up land. Last week there were so many Coltsfoot plants punctuating the wind and sea-lashed mud cliffs of Porthor beach, I thought I’d gone to heaven.

And I really like these places. Madame rolls her eyes and laughs at me when I run rapturously towards a slag heap, but here you can find some of the great survivors of the plant world. Often absolutely tiny, they make a scant living in the most unpromising places; for instance those lumps of dark rock in the bottom right hand photo are actually lead slag and in early spring, Common Whitlowgrass is among the few plants that can tolerate the concentrations of heavy metals like lead. The top right photo is of Danish Scurvygrass growing in pure sand. It’s common all around the coast, and I once chewed some (picked out of dog range) and it tasted pretty horrible – like gone off horseradish with mustard. For sailors however it was once a lifesaver due to its concentration of Vitamin C. Foragers like it for reasons best known to themselves and for them the good news is that salt gritting the roads has created Scurvygrass highways, reaching inland on verges.

Many ferns too can scratch a living on drystone walls and almost bare rocks, and so the list goes on. The adaptations to allow these precarious lives are as varied as the species themselves, and that’s the thing about evolution – it’s got time and sheer weight of numbers on its side; so many combinations and mutations to select from. One seaside favourite is the thickening and toughening of the skin – the description succulent kind of misses the emphasis that should rather lie with the plant’s capacity to resist drought, salt and all the other indignities of marginal life. Some ferns rely on what’s called apomixis – they’re self fertilised and so the minute spores can set up shop almost anywhere without fertilization by another plant – and my goodness they can travel in a favourable wind.

I get bored by formal gardens mainly because their glorious arrays are almost always the result of intensive breeding and human effort. They’re the well bred six footers who always get noticed first at the bar whilst the rest of us poorly bred peasants have to wait.

The most misused concept in farming is the idea of “improved pasture” because it’s not improved in any conceivable way- it’s just more productive in the single sense that it makes cattle fatter quicker. But the fact is that unimproved grassland yields better, stronger, far more biodiverse, health promoting and nutritious food; not just for meat production but also capturing and sequestering more carbon whilst sustaining the intricate web of wildlife – birds, flowers, pollinating insects in balance. Improved grassland is just a wasteful and expensive way of turning soil into dirt!

I don’t blame the farmers for this impasse. Decades of government policy and propaganda from supermarkets and agrochemical businesses have promoted the gods of economy, “progress” and yield, but just as the Canaanite god Moloch demanded child sacrifice, the gods of intensive agriculture have sacrificed the soil; offering only dwindling returns and throwing countless small farmers into bankruptcy and poverty.

Of course, picking up my initial thread, some plants will succeed in the most impoverished and polluted situations – which may be of comfort to those foragers who haven’t yet tried salad leaves contaminated with heavy metals. But there will be no botanists there to record and admire them. You see, to return to the idea of evolution, we have to remind ourselves that evolution carries on whether or not there are any humans around. After the barren earth and the inevitable famines, there will be plants and every other kind of wildlife, doing what my favourite plants have always done; adapting surviving and flourishing. This is the point we’re missing. If we want to survive as a species we need to follow their example and adapt the way we live until balance is restored once again.

There will always be snake oil sellers who offer fossil fuelled shares in going back to the good old days. Laugh at them. Laugh in their faces at their risible stupidity, because if there’s one thing we’ve forgotten in this scientific age it’s encapsulated in this adapted quip.

Q: What’s the difference between God and Nature?
A: You can negotiate with God.

Uncle Jim drops by

The shed – damaged by vandals two years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cautionary true story about my favourite river.

On 30 January 1607, around noon, the coasts of the Bristol Channel suffered from unexpectedly high floodings that broke the coastal defences in several places. Low-lying places in Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, and South Wales were flooded. The devastation was particularly severe on the Welsh side, extending from Laugharne in Carmarthenshire to above Chepstow in Monmouthshire. Cardiff was the most badly affected town, with the foundations of St Mary’s Church destroyed.

It is estimated that 2,000 or more people were drowned, houses and villages were swept away, an estimated 200 square miles (51,800 ha) of farmland inundated, and livestock destroyed, wrecking the local economy along the coasts of the Bristol Channel and Severn Estuary.

The coast of Devon and the Somerset Levels as far inland as Glastonbury Tor, 14 miles (23 km) from the coast, were also affected. The sea wall at Burnham-on-Sea gave way, and the water flowed over the low-lying levels and moors.

Wikipedia

Of course, you might think, it could never happen again here. You might think it but it would be wishful thinking. I’ll come to that in a moment. The domain name for this blog is “Severnsider” for a reason. I’ve loved the Severn since long before I found myself working in a parish whose boundary ran somewhere in the middle of it. I knew the parish boundary well enough to guide the skipper of the paddle steamer MV Balmoral to the spot where I once slipped the ashes of a retired Severn Pilot called Peter into the swirling waters, to the mournful sound of three long blasts on the ship’s steam whistle.

The river Severn is Britain’s longest river at 220 miles and it can be dangerous; overtopping its banks regularly as floodwaters pour down from the Cambrian Mountains, joined by its many tributaries. The estuary itself, is vulnerable to the South westerly prevailing winds and has the largest volume of water flowing into the sea of any river in England and Wales. When the enormous downstream spring tides meet gale force winds blowing upstream, flooding will follow as night follows day. Not often, but often enough in the past and in the last decades becoming the norm.

As a river it’s been hammered by industrial developments and pollution, warm water from a couple of (now closed) nuclear power stations and more recently by the eutrophication of large stretches by intensive farming – especially in the River Wye which joins the Severn beside the first modern Bridge carrying the M48. I knew the last putcher fisherman on our side of the river and he once told me that salmon were turning up with terrible sores on their flesh. Before he gave up he said he’d only caught three fish in several years.

Nobody in Government seems at all keen to tackle the pollution, but the many thousands of homes on the floodplain are a real political problem when, year after year they’re being inundated for weeks on end by filthy polluted water – and so in these decades of austerity, the combined forces of local, regional and national funding have found £100 million to improve flood defences . Amazon have built a huge warehouse in the middle of one of the affected areas and their astute tax lawyers will have made quite sure that none of their profits are diverted into protecting their own warehouse.

Notwithstanding all these problems the Severn still manages to be a hauntingly beautiful river; visible from miles away as a silver ribbon threading down through small farms and villages with their patchwork fields divided by rhynes and cider orchards along with one of my clutch of country parishes whose church and churchyard were sensibly built on a prominent knoll from which I expect to spend eternity keeping an eye on the river from my high vantage point – immune to winter storms and exalting in the sounds of migrating geese.

Anyway, enough maundering; my point is that the river floods but over the past years £100 million are being expended on keeping our feet dry. Except …….

For the past eight years we’ve kept our campervan in a locked compound barely fifty yards from the sea wall. There were occasions, before the works began, when we kept an anxious eye on the weather forecasts and then after a couple of major floodings up and down stream we joined an automatic warning service which sends out a text message when flooding is expected. We hadn’t expected that yesterday – well outside the normal flooding season – we would receive this text message.

Flood Alert Issued. Severn Estuary at Severn Beach. floodline.uk/112WATSVN1. To hear more information on this Alert, call Floodline 0345 9881188,8

UK Floodline alert.

Once again, the same scenario as 1607. A flood tide meeting stormwater plus a Southwesterly upstream gale heaps up the water (106 cubic metres a second at Apperly on a normal day – that’s a lot of double decker buses!) – and the defences are broached – even after all that money is being spent!

The point of all this is that we’re not preparing for the catastrophic effects of global climate change, we’re limping along after it; parsimoniously spending too little and too late while doing nothing to address the causes. Here we are again as politicians gather in Egypt for COP 27 and make promises they’ve no intention of keeping, while the lobbyists and their tame journalists spend billions persuading us that there’s no cause for alarm – it’s all a long way away and somewhere else. Well it isn’t. It’s right here and right now

But to say a little more about Peter, the Severn pilot. I discovered that during the 2nd World War he would pilot the petrol barges up from Avonmouth to the lock at Purton, just below the old railway bridge. In wartime this was a terribly hazardous journey against fierce tides, numerous underwater shallows and a winding course without the benefit of radar or even lights. Peter – who was a quiet and thoughtful man, would walk the banks of the Severn whenever he had some time off – to memorise the hazards. At his funeral service one of his old friends told me that one day he was prowling the bank in thick fog and as a ship drew near he heard a voice calling – “Is that you Peter?” On  25 October 1960 a couple of petrol barges misjudged the lock at Sharpness and were swept out of control upstream, colliding with one of the piers of the Severn Railway Bridge which, in the ensuing explosion and fire, collapsed. Five crew members died that night. The Severn has claimed many more victims over the previous centuries and we can only hope that she will not take many more lives as a consequence of our wishful thinking about climate change.

Autumn song

Heron spotted on the River Avon on Saturday

If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I’m not a fan of the recent changes to the seasonal calendar brought in by the Met Office. I know it’s tidier to begin the season of Autumn on September Ist and then rotate the rest on a three monthly cycle; easier but plain wrong. For me the seasons will always be marked by the solstices and equinoxes. Messy but holding tight to the astronomical events surrounding the hours of daylight. Last Friday saw the autumn equinox at exactly 2.03 am marking the moment of equal day and night and from now until December 21st the hours of darkness will get progressively longer.

Nature is, by and large, pretty orderly in her seasons too and so we instinctively recognise them by the quality of the light, sounds and smells. I’m interested that these phenomena actually seem to speak to us. Our absorption in the earth and her seasons means the bare sensation, of a birdsong for instance, becomes encrusted with memories. The smell of newly turned earth in the Spring evokes in me a powerful memory of Good Friday when, according to tradition, potatoes were planted. I think of a steady queue of customers at Palmer’s Seed Store and the smell of National Growmore fertilizer and Mr Flook the fishmonger in his wellingtons and yellow oilskin apron.

So these accretions of memories make simple things like listening to a singing Great Tit into a deeply embedded, often emotional, complex. Scientifically, and some would say factually, it’s just a singing bird with a Latin name representing something so common as to be beneath a birder’s dignity; but in the far greater field of meaning it’s as affecting as a Nightjar like the one that kept me awake much of the night, camping in France, or the Nightingale that I heard on a retreat near Ilfracombe one evening as I walked in the grounds.

But to get back to the Great Tit and the Autumn Equinox, something profoundly odd happened on Friday morning. I was helping our youngest move some last belongings out of the flat he’s just left. It’s been a sad few weeks because his relationship with his girlfriend has broken down and everyone’s been walking on eggshells. Anyway I was parked up in a place I shouldn’t have been, close to the old flat and keeping a sharp eye out for Parking Wardens who are pretty ruthless here in Bath. Then, as he carried the last load across the road, with his bass guitar in one hand and a bundle of clothes in the other – he looked just like the cover of the Bob Dylan’s “Freewheelin” Album sleeve. I would have been sad to see him that way except that as I sat there in the car with the window wound down, completely out of the blue I heard a Great Tit singing its two note ‘saw sharpening’ song, somewhere in the trees above. It’s a song I associate so powerfully with Spring and new beginnings that it felt like some kind of omen. “Stupid, irrational, meaningless emotional nonsense” say the ghosts of the old Logical Positivist philosophers, and “Hear Hear” say the materialist scientists, and yet ……. and yet?

Nothing I’ve ever come across shakes my understanding that language – whether human language or the subtle languages of mammals, birds and insects; or flowers, or the incomprehensible silent language known as the “Wood Wide Web” – that language is more like a coral reef growing in a sea of meanings, with living ideas on the outside and deep within, the whole history of human speaking, singing and dancing. The simplest level of reference in that unexpected out of season birdsong is probably the least interesting.

It’s been a long hot and dry summer and so it must have been the case that the bird I heard was singing out of season because in this settled weather a second brood was still “thinkable” and “do-able“. But he said much more than he intended. That Spring embodying song on the very day of the Autumn Equinox was a portent of new beginnings, a sign of environmental crisis, a reminder that Nature has her own ways and heaven help us if we ignore her signs.

More glory than you ever expected, plus an Oxford comma

Some of these photographs were taken from inside the campervan here in St Davids, and some in Whitesands Bay and St David’s opposite what’s known as the City Hall – but appears to be a charity shop. I suppose I could do a Matthew Arnold; lamenting the “melancholy soft withdrawing roar” of the tide on Brighton beach and compare my superior aesthetic response to St David’s with the inferior and faithless reactions of the pasty and ice cream eaters.

But life’s not that simple – not unless you’re one of those politicians that (they don’t deserve a who“) – can watch the destruction of lives and cultures with complete equanimity under the protection of a blind dogmatic faith (and I do mean faith) that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. It isn’t!

So I’ve been struggling to see how we can address the terrible problems that we face; and because we’re here in the van and out walking every day there’s been time to read and talk and think about how we might go on with some hope – because without it we’re sunk. With the present shower in power, it’s impossible to hope that conventional politics will ever find a way past the lobbyists and the bungs from the industrial giants and non-doms whose untaxed profits are salted away out of sight of the rest of us. There are some things we can do at a personal level, like growing allotments, walking and cycling, recycling, and, buying thoughtfully – (I stuck that Oxford comma in just to piss off Thérèse Coffey who as an obvious pedant doesn’t deserve a pause before her full stop!); but there are also some actions that can only be accomplished at a regional and national level.

There’s a tired old cliché in ‘management speak’ that has just enough truth in it to suggest a way forward: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. If national politics has a stranglehold on climate strategy and all the other major strategic decisions that need to be made then let’s concentrate on changing the culture instead. Let’s focus all our energy and resources on changing it using every cultural means possible instead of spending so many dispiriting hours at political meetings being voted down by members who just don’t get it. We have music, poetry, theatre, art of all kinds, samizdat newsletters, the internet, independent seminars and pop up schools; not to mention conversations with friends and neighbours.

There have been many occasions in history when the people – like the pasty and ice cream eaters and the people that run the charity shop, the hotel owner here who can’t get staff because of brexit, and me and Madame too, have wanted real change in sufficient numbers to sweep away the old guard. So why are we sitting around feeling sad and sorry for ourselves? To abuse a very good saying from the past – we have seen the solution, it is us!

Small harvest festival at the Potwell Inn?

And this isn’t the half of it. Its 7.00 pm and I’ve just finished processing the last of the tomatoes into 8 litres of passata. 10Kg of green tomatoes have gone to the freezer along with 10kg of damsons. We’ve already made shed-loads of roasted tomato passata and various chutneys so it’s been a great year. The Borlotti vines – as I mentioned a few days ago – simply rolled over in the heatwave; but the total yield of smaller beans was twice last year’s. We didn’t grow too much sweetcorn because the badger usually gets there first, but this year we erected a three layer fence around them and we’ve been eating them every day. More squashes – Uchiki Kuri and Crown Prince successfully completed the three sisters trio, although we didn’t try to grow them together after several years of trying. Apples are ripening – again a good year.

Our failures? Well the Calendula were a bit of a write off; the garlic bulbs were very small and the Courgettes and cucumbers seemed to hate the hot weather in spite of constant watering but the aubergines and melons sharing the polytunnel with basil and tomatoes loved it. The total yield of tomatoes was in the region of 150 lbs but we gave up counting . The wildflowers and herbs all benefited from the sunshine and, of course, the Mediterranean herbs loved the weather. The wildlife component was a complete success, with more pollinators and bees than ever before. Dragonflies, damselflies and bees and hoverflies were our constant companions and triggered the trailcam more than anything else. However we have filmed badgers, foxes, mice, domestic cats and rats – not to mention a roe deer one remarkable night. We’d love to set up a moth trap but sadly we’re so plagued by petty thefts we’d have to sit up all night with it.

So yes it’s been a wonderful year in spite of the weather; but it’s been a massive effort with watering, and then processing and storing. There’s always a bittersweet feeling as we complete harvesting for the year. It’s very early to be clearing beds but as ever the weather and the seasons have their own domain and we can only bend to their will.

What I miss, more than anything else, is the opportunity to share in thanksgiving. Obviously we can silently vocalise our thanks but there’s nothing like a public liturgy – which needn’t be at all overtly religious -but allows us to gather with our neighbours and say thanks. There’s a sense of glory in the air as we gather our crops together, but somehow our much talked about connection with nature has been ruptured over the past decades. Nature is something we all too often look at and admire passively at second hand. Eating a melon you’ve grown, warm from the sun is something else, and peeping into a store cupboard full to bursting with food for the winter and the hungry gap gives reason for hope even in a time of uncertainty and fear.

So I miss the giant marrows and the harvest loaf and the rejected apples, even with the rotten bits turned to the back out of sight. I miss the harvest festival where one of our wealthier congregation members once sorted through a pocketful of change and picked out the copper coins to put into the collection while the steward waited patiently. I miss the way that the unlikeliest people would turn up because they could see the point of it all, and I miss counting the hundreds of tins of food that were collected every year to be taken to a homeless charity and I miss roaring out the hymns that lurk somewhere deep in collective memory although we hardly share their feudal sentiments any more.

So the closest I can get to that public thanksgiving is here. As always I am utterly blown away and grateful – even joyful – because the harvest has come home – again – in spite of every obstacle thrown in its way.

“Run the economy like a business” – are you completely batshit crazy? we need to run it like a garden!

Another night of strange dreams led to a sleepless night for Madame as I tossed and turned and made (as she described them) weird noises. I dream a lot, and years of work – hard work too – with a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, have taught me to treat them with the utmost seriousness. So here’s the deal – my dream was about cutting metre square sections of rough grass full of weeds, and setting them out in the usual unspecified way, to conduct an experiment concerned with watching weeds grow. I even dreamed of setting the trailcam to time lapse mode in order to get a continuous film of them growing. Principal among them was our old garden enemy – Bindweed.

Then this morning I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer marvellous book – “Braiding Sweetgrass” when a connection dropped into place and I was able to see a very small part of a remedy for the crisis we’ve now created for ourselves.

The hot seat!

Allow me a small diversion to help explain the background. I was a school governor for over forty years and in that time we interviewed at least six head teachers. In spite of endless pains we still managed to appoint one complete dud but otherwise they were great human beings with a passion for making children into moral grownups. We interviewed them over two days, handed them heaps of data and gave them an hour to read and digest it then come up with a viable step by step plan. We tested their management and leadership skills by asking them to debate the difficult data with other candidates. We watched and noted those who could embrace challenges thoughtfully and without becoming defensive. It was exhausting for us and even worse for the candidates, but slowly the best candidate for our particular school – with its own unique history and challenges – would emerge.

If you compare that level of diligence with the present election for Prime Minister you will understand immediately how our political system makes such terrible decisions. As I once heard on a bus on the way home from Southmead – “That Jack B …….. he can’t tell shit from pudding!” I have a whole collection of those kinds of remarks, overheard from people who stretch the colloquial into Shakespearean beauty. We have a parliament full of people who share Jack B’s incapacity.

So back to dreams and weeds and revelations, and the connection is this. When we plan the next season on the Potwell Inn allotment we pay attention to the space we have, the nature of the local climate and its variabilities; the soil and its state and – in particular – we pay attention to our own needs. Do we need fifty purple sprouting plants? How many pounds of tomatoes do we really need?

And we also know that our land isn’t just for us – it’s for the thousands of species that – while we can’t eat them – play a vital role in the ecology of the plot. Some of the pests who predate upon the pests who damage our crops are visible – frogs, toads, parasitic wasps and so forth. Some are microorganisms. Some are mixed blessings – badgers for instance; and foxes, cats and even rats play complicated roles of fleas and smaller fleas in the terms of the old rhyme.

Weeds and pests and their many interactions play such a huge and poorly understood role in the overall health of the plot that we leave them alone. So to chase down an analogy – we either draw a binary distinction between friend and foe, and then bomb the foe out of existence in the manner of intensive chemically driven agriculture, or we nurture the richest possible mix of living creatures and edible plants and allow nature to find the kind of balance that allows us a crop, reduces pest damage and leaves the soil in good heart. And it really works!

Running the economy – and especially the ecology – of the earth as if it were a business completely focused on financial profit and loss is a form of ideological madness. Public goods are very hard to monetize, and yet we know that climate destruction brings tremendous costs. We know that farming practices which lead to wholesale species destruction will result in food shortages. We know that viruses can cross over between animals and humans and cause pandemics, and we suspect that the destruction of animal habitat through forest clearance makes this possibility greater. We also know that intensive farming of any kind causes pollution; carbon release and therefore global heating. The point of this line of argument is to emphasise that running the earth as a business so often ignores the cost of adverse consequences. If the full long-term costs of maintenance and disposal of radioactive waste are added to the business plan no investor in their right mind would take the risk. Sadly our government is able to use our money to make us compulsory investors in this dangerous industry.

Running the economy – basing our governance on its impact on the whole earth would make big business howl. Just as an example – the current price of all electricity is based on the inflated price of fossil fuels. This represents the mad economics of subsidising the oil companies by penalising renewables. In a genuine – that’s to say not rigged – market. The renewables would outcompete the fossils on price and the oil and gas producers would have to invest their ill gotten gains in renewables in order to stay in business at all. This is not fantasy economics.

Why weeds then? Why embrace pests and predators? Because any unstable ecosystem will be made more stable if a natural balance is reached. Climate catastrophe is the end point of ignoring the instability made worse by politicians who make stupid policies such as running the economy like a business – and then facilitate the predatory activities of corporate behemoths.

James Lovelock died this week. His Gaia theory gives us the best possible tool for understanding the harm we’ve done to ourselves and future people. The key is going to be diversity. The binary world of bad science and dangerous politics needs to be swept away so we can learn to tend the whole earth – in all its inspiring diversity – as a garden.

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