Tag: climate change

A challenging two days on Dartmoor. I’m lost for words!

The River Erme in spate at Ivybridge on Thursday.

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.

And then the floods

The River Avon downstream from the centre of Bath

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.

Muted celebrations and big ones. Three Musketeers go plant hunting and a big think.

Jill Lough’s sherry trifle

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 !

Camino 9. The transhumance

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.

Deer and not cheap!

The same ride after two years without the deer

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!

Stale yeast – bad news!

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!

For want of a nail the shoe was lost ..

The beginnings of the container garden

Today we started to make a container garden outside our block of flats. We’ve been talking about doing it for months and then our neighbour, Wes, plonked a couple of containers down and the blank wall just came to life. After that it was a no-brainer and we bought and borrowed some pots and brought things down from the allotment to make a start. This is a community project that just seems to have spread right down the street. The majority of front entrances now have displays outside – some of them really beautiful. I put this photo up on the residents’ app a few minutes ago and got 5 likes within minutes so maybe others will want to join in.

We’re massively lucky to live right in the centre of Bath, but this is also an area of great deprivation with a lot of social housing and – as I’ve written before – big problems caused by drugs and alcohol, with ambulances being called almost daily. On the plus side we have a big patch of green outside which, in hot weather, becomes a favourite venue for parties and barbecues. I have an entirely personal theory that the nicer we make the area look, the better people will behave, so this is our street campaign to make this area family friendly and welcoming. There are no rules, no committee, no chief executive and no competitions. Occasionally we organize, but more often than not some kind of street party just happens spontaneously. One of our neighbours will sit out on the broad Georgian pavement with a bottle of wine and before you know it there are half a dozen of us. Most of us live in some kind of social housing and we have a tremendous mix of musicians, teachers, nurses and even a couple of retired professors along with the retired and unemployed all with different and interesting backstories.

I titled this piece “For want of a nail … ” because this traditional rhyme brings home one of the most critical issues in our society. The neglect of tiny things can often have catastrophic consequences. Loneliness and isolation are endemic, especially among older and poorer people and the cost of neglecting it is prodigious. In the current environmental crisis we are losing species every day and we have absolutely no idea which of those losses will prove critical, so every little wildlife garden we create, every journey we make using public transport, every action we take to build stronger communities, every small act of kindness could just make the difference.

Covid had a terrible effect on community life and just about every voluntary organisation has suffered. Many people are still scared of crowded places and it will take a long time to mend the damage. These small instances of community action are also acts of resistance against the ideology that preaches that there’s no alternative to the neoliberal economic orthodoxy that loads the burden on to the poorest and most vulnerable families. The mere existence of functioning neighbourhoods and communities that are maintained by the people who live in them and share their experience and good fortune freely are anathema to our Gradgrind government.

In many ways living here feels like a return to the sixties and seventies. There are very few advantages in being old, but one of them is the experience of communal living at its best and worst, and understanding that if something needs doing you can just do it. It’s amazing what can be achieved without grant support and official recognition. But if we wait for the politicians to change things it’s all over for human life on earth.

A redemptive bus ride to the supermarket

This campsite in Pembrokeshire has the huge advantage of being about a quarter of a mile from a bus stop that’s part of a circular route around the local coastline. It’s called the Celtic Coaster and for £4 you can buy a day ticket that allows you to get on and off as many times as you like and at any of the stops. It’s ideal for walking and also ideal for shopping in St Davids because it runs every half an hour so if you get your skates on you can catch the bus to the centre, do a lively run around the shops and be back on the City Hall bus stop in time to catch the same bus back to the campsite. The lanes here are really narrow and often congested and parking in St Davids is as far from the shops as we are from the bus stop so it’s an environmental no-brainer to leave the campervan behind. Another plus is that the drivers are so cheerful and obliging that we usually get dropped off at the campsite entrance and yesterday we were such a merry bunch of passengers I thought we might even start singing. To be honest, the thought of that kind of atmosphere on one of our local city buses is a faraway dream; but a sense of community, shared values and belonging will have to be a part of any emergent culture to replace the hostile and suspicious communities of one that constitute the smouldering remains of culture wars.

But aside from that little redemptive challenge to the status quo, there was something else on my mind as we cut through Gospel Lane and down New Street towards the supermarket, because this wasn’t just about shopping but is also the scene of my ecological idiocy in 2019 when I uprooted a chunk of the plant which I subsequently discovered was the second of only two previous sightings. I’ve never shared the photos I took back in the van because I knew that the obvious question would be “why did you take this away to photograph it?” But I think I dare show one of them today because I found redemption on the car park wall! It’s not even a very good photograph – the lighting’s rubbish and it really doesn’t show enough of the key features, but that’s something you learn as you go along. Any way, if you scroll up to the top of this piece you’ll find what we found yesterday. That little solitary plant has now grown into the handsome stand we found yesterday. I could have done a celebratory jig but I lacked the nerve.

Rough Chervil seeds

Photographing plants is a skill that takes a while to develop and I’m only just getting a grip on it. The Catch 22 is that you never know what the important features are until you know what the plant is. As some wag once said – the keys in the floras are only any use if you already know what you’ve got. So not being an expert I just take lots of photos from different angles, using a macro lens to capture fine detail and using a small ruler to measure some of the parts that I know will be important. With the Carrot family, for instance, the exact shape and dimensions of the seeds are crucial to getting an ID. The payback is that the closer you look, the more intensely beautiful the seeds become. You could spend a lifetime making handbuilt pots based on them and you’d never run out of inspiration. This is the point where science and art overlap. Here, for example, are the seeds of Rough Chervil that I photographed this week on the campsite. These days all my photos are taken on a Pixel 6a phone with an add on macro lens that costs less than £50. It’s a joy not having to lug a huge bag of kit around and all my stuff for an excursion fits into a small shoulder bag.

As we walked down to the bus stop I also caught sight of what turned out (after a lot of head scratching) to be Black Spleenwort. I really wanted it to be Lanceolate Spleenwort which would be a first record, but my selfish desires were trumped by good science. With ferns you really need to look at the shapes but also in microscopic detail at the way the spores are carried at the back of the leaves. If you’re at all interested in ferns – and I think they’re addictive – the little green swellings called “indusia” contain the “sori” the almost microscopic bundles of spores called sporangia, and which contain the spores themselves – millions of them! Here’s a selection of photos I took near the bus stop. It’s not all about glamorous adventures in the jungle!

After a drought we shouldn’t complain – but secretly we do

The view through the windscreen when we woke up today

We know exactly where they are – Ramsey Island, St David’s Head and the dragon backed hills beyond, but they’re invisible; crouched under a blanket of cloud and rain. The van shudders and rocks now and again in the blustery wind and it seems that everyone else has left the campsite. The big group of young people left, bedraggled, this morning. They tried their very best to party last night, circling their cars like covered wagons in the mist. The music started quietly and worked to a climax as one of the lads demonstrated his car’s special trick of flashing the headlights to the rhythm- but the light show only lasted ten minutes at most and the music soon died down to the point where we could hear them talking quietly. I was sad for them because there was no heartbreakingly beautiful sunset to watch and it was cold, damp and hostile to youthful dreams that so often come apart in the cold light of reality. Friendships and relationships strong, fragile or merely desired were untouched by lightning bolts and revelations and the lecking ground that the boys had created was more often deserted by the girls who preferred their own company. I remember it all so well; the temptation to settle for less and let go of the dreams.

Or maybe that’s all just part of my personal psychogeography – the sadness I sense seeping from shores and strandlines, especially out of season. Maybe it’s to do with the sound of the waves which taunt us and say – “no; ‘eternal’ is the wrong word. Times and seasons, rise and fall, spring and neap – this is what ‘forever’ really feels like. Eternity is a suburban religious concept born out of the fear of change“.

A confession

Anyway, there are bigger fish to fry this holiday, well botanical fish anyway, because in an email exchange with the local Vice County Recorder a couple of years ago – (they’re the first line volunteers who make sure that beginners and idiots like me don’t submit wrongly identified records) – he verified a record I’d sent and then wished me well; suggesting that I might have a look for three modestly unusual plants, growing right next to the campsite. I never properly thanked him for his encouragement because I knew that I’d committed a grave sin out of sheer ignorance. We were in a hurry to catch the bus back to the campsite and I spotted something I’d never seen before and carelessly ripped a lump away so I could identify it later. This is the shadow sin to the more normal one of thinking that every plant I don’t recognise must be vanishingly rare. Anyway, after a bit of a struggle I managed to photograph the bit of the plant I’d taken and key it out and – to my great embarrassment – it really was very unusual. Only one previous record of it growing wild in St Davids city. The karmic punishment for this is that every time we go to the supermarket to stock up I search the wall fiercely in search of survivors and cry inwardly “out damned spot.” If that kindly VC Recorder ever reads this story – I’m truly sorry and I’ve never removed so much as a leaf since that day. I just take photos of all the parts of the plants that clinch the identity.

So these three plants, then – Wormwood, Dwarf Mallow and Corn Parsley – well the Wormwood seems just the ticket for an act of atonement if I can find it, but I’ll excuse myself the gall. Corn Parsley is one of those declining plants that once thrived in the different world that we’ve hubristically destroyed and Dwarf Mallow will be a doddle to identify if I can but find it. I shall send the three records as compensation, wash my feet in St Non’s Well and then do a jig.

Every time we come here I’m struck by how very different the mix of plants is. For the first few days I feel utterly incompetent until I get my eye in. Climate, geology, wind, rain and salt shape the coastal plant life in a unique way and I’m always awestruck by nature’s capacity to adapt and change. By the way, I’m well aware that calling nature some kind of thing is a kind of category error. The other day I photographed a Ribwort Plantain on the allotment site. It just shouted at me – “Look at me; I’m different!”

Would it be impolite to say to the plant – “My goodness, those are the longest flower stalks I’ve ever seen on a Plantain!” – Again I sent the photo off to the North Somerset Vice County Recorder and she was quite sure it was both unusual but also no more than a genetic variation; an intellectual bridge too far for me. The thought that plants and other organisms merrily go through life as if they were at a car boot sale picking up bits of DNA that – as my grandfather would say – “might come in useful one day”. I can imagine Madame balking at me trying to smuggle an electron scanning microscope on to the van – and as for DNA I discovered that hand DNA scanning devices really exist at fabulous expense so I’m afraid it’s back to the Book of Stace for me.

So here we are in West Wales but strangely my mobile phone thinks for the purposes of weather reports we’re in County Wexford in Ireland. I’m hoping that doesn’t mean they’re imposing roaming charges on the data SIM. It’s raining almost continually after weeks of punishing sunshine so we’re in no position to grumble, but naturally we lament the fact that after all the watering and nurturing of our infant crops; and after assisting with watering on eight other allotments whose owners were sunbathing languidly on holiday; and after packing almost no cold-weather clothes we’re confined to the campervan; and I’m writing rather than pottering around in the sunshine. “Never mind” – we say “Life’s an ever flowing well of interesting events”, and it’s true but as I wrote earlier in this post, it sometimes refuses to live up to our expectations.

Sunset – last September

You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.

The lake at Upper Treginnis today. It looks as if somewhere between 300 and 500 cubic meters of water have been pumped.
The same lake in September 2022
Musk Thistle

There’s a walk we do when we’re in St Davids and it takes us past a small lake – almost certainly dug for irrigation years ago. Since we’ve been coming here it’s been one of those dead cert places for all sorts of wildlife, with a large population of dragonflies, damselflies, birds, insects and marsh plants. It is (or perhaps was) surrounded by several organic farms. Today as we walked past we saw one farmer tilling two fields of old pasture. Our favourite mushroom gathering place was tilled and planted up with rye and another field, badly infested with Musk Thistle had been sprayed with some kind of weedkiller. Worse again, the pond had been drained of 2/3 of its water and apart from some insect hunting reed warblers and a few Wagtails had become a ghastly eutrophic puddle, thick with blanket weed; and what had been the point of all this water being pumped out? – as we continued our walk down to the beach we spotted the reason; several fields planted up with thirsty potatoes. Elsewhere other once-thriving pasture fields were dried out and worthless.

I think this is Chicory sown in the herbal ley mix at Upper Treginnis last year – no longer to be seen in the drought afflicted meadow

I can see the dilemma for the farmers here. This is a very small area with a rich flora and fauna and difficult soil most suited to pasture used mainly in the past for sheep. The government have been completely hopeless in supporting these marginal farms which could, and should, be kept as biodiversity hotspots, and I’m not sure that many farmers either understand the new ELMS environmental subsidy scheme, or indeed trust the government to put enough money into it. Let’s be clear; supporting the environment isn’t a plan for entertaining wildlife enthusiasts it’s essential for food production – for pollination for instance but also to support the incredibly complex food chains where, if one link fails, the consequences can be dire. Nobody is arguing that all agricultural land should be returned to the so-called wild – it’s more like saying if you polish your car every week but never service it or maintain it properly it will break down. Farmers land up trying to pay off the bank with dodgy cash crops; gambling against the system to save their land.

Anyway, that’s enough – there are many interlinking problems here. Farmers are forced into growing the wrong crops because doing the right things would lead them inevitably into bankruptcy; the climate is changing so rapidly that extreme events are becoming almost commonplace; and when food is treated as a commodity, prices are driven down by supermarkets and farmers suffer. I remember an alarming conversation with a retired grain dealer who explained how it was possible to make fantastic returns by harvesting subsidies as a crop was loaded onto a train and passed through several countries without ever being unloaded. Producers and consumers are the innocent victims of this profiteering.

The net result is a rather depressing walk through a once favourite wildlife hotspot. Happily we still managed to find a lovely little Marsh Bedstraw – Galium palustre and the Musk Thistles rising from their chemically damaged rosettes; but the drying out of the pool has allowed hordes of Hemlock Water Dropwort to germinate which, if they continue to thrive, will be a menace to cattle. All this is a part of the rapid march of global heating and environmental breakdown coupled with an inexcusable profiteering food chain. Broken politics makes everything so much worse. Anyway here’s a photo of the Marsh Bedstraw – nature abhors a vacuum! Last night we celebrated our arrival with several bottles of wine and listened to all our favourite music as the sun set and the moon became visible high in the darkening sky. We slept well!