Tag: depression

Dropping the mask – safety in numbers!

The database that didn’t know when to stop. On the monitor Tinder fungus in Henrietta Park

Yesterday, as I was typing the latest batch of plants into the database, it suddenly dawned on me that the Potwell Inn isn’t the only journal I keep. This is a long and rather meandering story, but after we retired and after a particularly stressful family Christmas, we took ourselves down to Cornwall and were leaning over the sea wall in St Ives watching the waders and gulls when I realized that I didn’t have a clue what any of them were called. With the inscrutable emptiness of any retirement plans lapping around in my mind, I made a ludicrous resolution that from then on I’d refuse to walk past anything I couldn’t name. Of course – like all resolutions – it was broken before we left the beach, but what followed was a trip to the local bookshop and our first bird book.

At that stage I’d been keeping a journal for some years but it was locked and private because much of it referred to my work and troubling family matters. Then technology intervened; my computer kit refused to communicate with the app I was using and in spite of a bit of helpline raging I was told that my kit was ancient rubbish and I should spend several thousand pounds on renewing it or piss off into outer darkness where there would be less gnashing of teeth. I’d reached the point in my church work where I could hardly cope with any more grief and felt my ability to empathise was slowly shrinking. With retirement imminent and following a great deal of group therapy and several years of one-to-one psychoanalytic psychotherapy I made the crucial decision to go public and start a blog in which I could pay more attention to celebrating life and being human. The Potwell Inn, the blog you’re reading now is approaching its tenth birthday. WordPress was more tolerant of heritage kit and in fact in the ensuing years I’ve moved across three platforms and four computers without a hitch. The pleasing irony is that WordPress eventually bought out the self-righteous and surly Day One and honour was satisfied.

The Potwell Inn was always intended to be a safe place for me to work in. After decades (my whole working life|) of negotiating dangerous places like public schools, prisons, youth centres and psychiatric hospitals to the Church of England (which was by far the most dangerous) I was pretty much burnt out and I needed to find somewhere to be truly myself without having to pretend I was the fearless and fun-loving extrovert I was generally taken to be. Here in the Potwell Inn, with a few notable exceptions, I have no idea who’s reading about me and for the most part I don’t need to mask or self-censor. I still need to guard against oversharing, and this is probably an appropriate moment to remind readers that the Potwell Inn is a virtual pub whose concept is borrowed from HG Wells’ comic novel “A history of Mr Polly” which was a set text from school but which provided me with an imaginary safe place as I day dreamed and gazed through the classroom window on airless summer days. Very few people I’ve known have really got past my armour so my cherished hope is that the customers – i.e. the readers of the Potwell Inn – find something in common here.

As a child my escape strategy was books. I became a completely promiscuous reader of biographies, the complete works of Dickens, Wells, later Henry Williamson, and up into much later writers. I consumed poetry, particularly the Black Mountain poets. My first involuntary tic involved moving the book past my eyes as opposed to moving my eyes across the page. I would begin a new line with the book held level with my ear. Mr Jablonski the ophthalmologist apparently thought it was just an odd habit and I’d soon get over it. Well I did and I didn’t, in that the tic just moved elsewhere; I lost the disturbing reading habit and started twisting my mouth and neck painfully. Much later I discovered that with an effort of will I could sometimes move it to less visible places, at about the same age- maybe ten or eleven, that I started to feel unable to breathe when things were sprung unexpectedly on me. My diaphragm would tighten like a drum and I could only partially fill my lungs. My Dad had a laudable thing about never making promises he couldn’t be sure of keeping but he sometimes applied it in upsetting ways, for instance by never telling my sister and I when we were going on holiday. We would go downstairs and see the suitcases standing near the door and I would be thrown into a panic – having no idea what was coming next.

The second thread of this post is a lifelong love of lists. The first book I remember was a picture dictionary, rapidly followed by i Spy books, Observer guides and a never ending sequence of obsessions that my Mother would disparage as “fads”. I became an expert on the rigging of sailing ships which led to a lifelong interest in knots – the cue for binge reading Patrick O’Brian. I could list the later (almost always non fiction) books that captured me – “The Foundations of Wireless” by M G Scroggie, way beyond my comfort zone; “Writing Illuminating and Lettering” by Edward Johnston – whose house in Putney we stumbled upon last year; and then after studying “A Potter’s Book” by Bernard Leach, I got into Parmelee on ceramic glazes and now over sixty years later I’m sitting next to the fourth edition of Clive Stace’s “New Flora of the British Isles”. Every one of these books involved the writing and testing of lists – endless lists which, all bar the last ten years or so, are lost forever. I even crack jokes about “feeling a list coming on”, which I think only Madame understands.

My first wildlife lists were handwritten in scruffy notebooks and also in about 17,000 photographs; many duplicated, two thirds of which didn’t even have basic EXIF data. The jumbled and unexamined sediment of a white knuckle life lived in fear of being “found out” – although I never knew what for. I’ve mentioned my melancholic temperament several times in this blog, but it occasionally tips over into what one doctor called “phobic anxiety” and even depression. In my twenties I knew I was ill when I started to see the winter trees as the bronchioles and alveoli of dead people. My mood was only lifted by absorbing, sinking myself in technical detail – the more complex the better and so I emerged from my ceramics degree with more knowledge of glazes and firing than was thought proper by the faculty members who believed that creativity did better when it was uncluttered by any technique at all. I recall a testy exchange with the Head of Department when he saw a drawing of an apple tree which I’d made which attempted to express its characteristic form. All living things have distinctive forms just as they have their individual variations. Close, even meditative attention is the prerequisite of all of art and science. He denied furiously that there was anything distinctive about tree forms and I may have given a sharp reply. That capacity to start fights also followed me through life. I never could defer to flawed or undeserved authority; neither could I tolerate pomposity, and in the end I got fairly used to being called ! “the rudest person I’ve ever met!” to which I would sometimes reply “Well you’ve been lucky then!” One of the best teachers who really stretched me – Sid Harris who taught Sociology – would challenge my flights of fancy by saying firmly “that’s all very well David – but where’s the evidence???” Evidence, honesty, clarity and truthfulness are foundational to civil society. Neglect them and you land up with fraudsters, liars, rapists insurrectionists and racists running the country. My principal defence at school became what must have seemed a frighteningly quick gift of sarcasm. By the end of first year sixth form I’d come within a whisker of getting myself into real trouble and left school with my collar being felt by the Head Teacher whose neurotypicality would have won awards, and my first job was as a junior photographic technician at the university where they handed me a Leica and a box of film; showed me where the darkroom was and said “go and learn to use them”. It didn’t last long but I managed to get a City and Guilds qualification. After that I tasted the joys of unskilled engineering work and welding before Madame and I met when she was 15 and I was 18 and she persuaded me to go back to college. I was astonished when they offered me a place.

I could go on but there’s no point except to say that at some point last year I decided to sort out my photos. I was interested to see whether I could recognize as many as 100 wild plants. I started off with a very elementary database but the more data I typed in, the more possibilities for extending my understanding popped into my mind and the more complex it became until it became a thing of beauty; a second Potwell Inn journal expressed in a different language. The photos, mostly taken on a phone over the past eleven years had enough attached EXIF data to reconstruct the past in diary form. I could find a photo and its date and location and it would evoke the whole complexity of the moment of discovery. Other details were embedded in my memory; of smells, of landscapes, of my companions (usually Madame). The database soon had over 350 entries, some of the plants I’d entirely forgotten ever encountering. The referencing and identification is quite intense work but after a few hours spending time – even with people I know and trust on, for instance, a field trip – I need a few hours of solitude to recover. I slip into my study, turn the computer on and open the Floras I’m using and an intense feeling of safety and relaxation floods through me. Memories of holidays, walks and random strolls along the river and canal banks can repair all those stressed out neurons.

There’s a deep historical, maybe spiritual significance in the naming of things. In the Old Testament as the creation is described (this isn’t a religious riff by the way, I’m just pointing out how fundamental the naming of things is). So in Genesis 1 – the first of 2 creation stories – and not many people notice that there are two – God creates and divides the higher orders – birds, sea monsters, every living creature that moves and then generalizes every green plant for food (does that make God 1 a vegetarian? a poisoner?) – and feels rather pleased. Then in chapter 2, a second and different account, God 2 makes everything in its higher order and then after a bit of dangerous cultural faladiddle in creating Eve, invites Adam to inspect and name all the living things – thereby making him the first taxonomist. Orders, families, genera, species and eventually sub-species. Put briefly, we’ve been naming and ordering things from the very beginnings of written culture.

A single flower is a single dollop of data – enjoy it while it lasts in a jam jar. A photograph with an added date and location makes it ten times as useful to our understanding. My 17,000 uncatalogued photos (not all of them flowers of course) is a personal scrap heap, of no use or interest to anyone except me and the ever patient Madame. But when I extract just half of a percent of them and tabulate them in a searchable database with “who, what, where and when” – all verified then they become seriously interesting and useful. But not only useful. I would insist that these living libraries of accumulated knowledge are beautiful.

At the New Year Madame and I went on our usual walk and found 22 plants in flower. Our Bath Natural History Society group went out a day later and recorded 66. A couple of days later again the lists were published nationally and I discovered that a plant which I’d recorded as Canadian Fleabane, which grew profusely outside our flat two years ago; was this year recorded as two different species – the Bilbao Fleabane and Guernsey Fleabane. I just had to go and check my apparent mistake and so I went out on Sunday in a freezing drizzle and gathered some samples of what looked like very dead material brought them home to take measurements and macro photographs and after a lot of head scratching and turning of pages came to the conclusion that they were right and I was wrong. Good news and bad news because I got an extra record. The trainspotter trap is never far from the surface.

There was more good news when we spotted (left – Right) the first Celandine of the year, Butcher’s Broom in flower and Cow Parsley in flower too as well as some Snowdrops. Spring is just around the corner.

But perhaps the tree walk we went to on Saturday yielded the nicest surprise, because we were shown something which was visually completely uninteresting and yet reminded me of a time when this part of the world was full of enormous Elm trees. On the left is an Elm sapling. It won’t get much bigger because it will soon be struck down by Dutch Elm disease, but I understand that resistant varieties are being sought out and grown on. I’d really love to see just one fully grown and magnificent Elm back in Wiltshire where we were students and fell in love with the landscape.

Dropping the mask has been quite a challenge – just as coming to terms with my own occasional oddness has been equally challenging. Possibly, my friends might say, the effort has been entirely theirs but diversity is the very essence of nature. Every living being, every plant, animal, insect or fungus is largely the same as every other of its kind – and yet different somewhere deep in its recesses. I wouldn’t swap with anyone else for the world. As a lesson from nature it’s irreplaceable and, for me, so are the lists which offer the safety in numbers that I mentioned in the title. Almost every wildlife programme we watch wants to suggest that nature is healing – that going for a walk in nature somehow fills us with an invisible miasma that makes us whole again. Well that may be partly true but I’d love to see it tested in some scientific way because my own thought is that it’s not just walking through it that does the trick but engaging deeply with it. It’s the engagement that makes us well – and the deeper the better!

The three graces – a rainy day job

Left to right –

  • Devil’s-bit Scabious, Succisa pratensis, Porthor beach, Lleyn.
  • Sheep’s-bit, Jasione montana, Martin’s Haven, Pembrokeshire.
  • Small Scabious, Scabiosa columbaria, Bannerdown Common. Bath.
  • At least I think so!

This little botanical odyssey began for me in July 2017, approaching seven years ago. I suppose a flora written by an extremely inexperienced botanist would find very few buyers, and sorting this group out has been a long job for me, foxed -as I’ve always been – by the similarity in colour. They all look a bit like the Scabious my mother loved and grew in the garden. Now; looking at them side by side on the page it’s obvious that they’re different but I’ve never seen even two, let alone three of them side by side in the same place. They were all separated by years and distance across a line between Bath and Snowdonia; each to its own preferred habitat.

Anyway it’s been raining for two days, limiting any outdoor attractions, and three big ideas came along like buses. The first idea was that I’m probably not going to die – at least not yet. This idea – call it the Black Dog if you like – has been haunting me for more than fifty years. The first and worst occasion nearly got me thrown out of art school for not showing up. We were living in an idyllic cottage above Bybrook and doing the things we were most passionate about, and yet I was tormented by the spectre of death – winter trees became veins and lungs, I felt permanently exhausted and without any hold on the future, no vision; no comfort at all in nature. In the end, and under threat of being expelled, I went to the doctor and, refusing to give me antidepressants, he prescribed regular trips to the pub.”You need people, not pills” he said. He was right, and soon afterwards a wonderful revelation was given to me. “Yes you are going to die, but not yet!” So bus number one came back this week and I realised that the phobic anxiety I was diagnosed with all those years ago had returned and then gone away again.

Bus number two was the annual discussion with Madame about whether we should sell the campervan. When she suggested it would be better to get it repaired and perhaps even take ourselves away for a whole month of walking, drawing, writing and botanising I felt my heart leap – for once in a good way.

Bus number three was the impulse buy I mentioned in my last post – “Frustrating Flowers and Puzzling Plants” by John M Warren and published by Pelagic Press. After a couple of months of being unable to do any serious botanical study, the book lit me up and I suddenly felt that spring and summer were truly on the way and calling me outside to meet all those precious plants again. Even better was the fact that the illustrations in the book were not only excellent but also looked very like a series of studies I once did of Hyacinth flowers. It suddenly occurred to me that what this little group of three – but could be half a dozen pale blue Scabious like flowers - needed, was a highly detailed set of drawings of their heads, including blowups of their reproductive bits, to help me – and perhaps others as well – get our heads around identifying them apart. I knew I could do it. A hand-holding guide to avoid being made to feel small by an expert. I once said to a very experienced botanist that I found grasses difficult. They simply said “Oh grasses are easy!” I was so incensed I spent months crawling around in fields trying to sort them out and three years later I’m nowhere near good, but improving.

So the oppressive cloud suddenly lifted and I felt a happy place opening up between now and the unavoidable fact that one day the wheels will fall off – but not yet! Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

All this led to a deep dive into my photos. My usual practice is to photograph plants – which is a skill in itself; knowing what you’ll most wish you’d noted when you’re back home with the books. However my enthusiasm for pressing the shutter – which takes moments – is countered by the time it takes to put names to the plants. It can take hours, days or even years to make a secure identification, and the more you practice the harder it seems to get. The photos are just the beginning of the process. The three graces at the top of the post involved a fascinating excursus around the sex life of the Devil’s-bit scabious when I realized that my photos were nowhere near good enough to make any visual sense of the meaning of gynodioecious, thrown at me by the Book of Stace (IV). That knowledge will go forward with me because I now have a plan to revisit all three plants, and any more cousins I can find – in order to become a bit of an expert at some perfectly ordinary and common plants. Naming things is the most tremendous fun. It turns nature into an old friend and makes every walk and adventure; and if I make a mistake – well, nobody dies and the worst that can happen is that I feel a bit silly for a moment: but then field botanists are some of the kindest and most helpful people you could hope to meet. Mostly.

I don’t joke about my old enemy the black dog. It can really mess you up, but if that’s you too, take heart in the truth of the moment. The beauty at hand will always drive out the dog on the horizon.

Rage against the dying of the light.

Some days go well and some go really badly and some can make you wonder what on earth is the point of it all. I’m writing this as a fully paid up member of melancholics anonymous, and I must stress right now there’s an important distinction between melancholy and depression – it’s not just a posh middle class word for being a bit down. I’ve had my fair share of the black dog too and it’s utterly different from other moods. Melancholy is a mode of being in which thinking – often deep and creative thinking – is still possible. Depression is paralysing, grey and empty and awful.

So the only property this melancholy shares with the black dog of depression is that it’s more likely to come on in the spring. Goodness knows why sunshine and the beginnings of new growth should provoke introspection but it does – it’s a statistical fact.

Yesterday we were on our way to see if the campervan would start after 5 months of complete lockdown and we had a conversation about the consequences of this pandemic. We know we’re paying a price for this lockdown but it’s incredibly hard to nail it down. It’s more than thinking to yourself that you’ll scream and smash your head on the wall if you have to pack the dishwasher in exactly the same careful and efficient way, even once more. Social division is certainly one of the costs. We’ve become suspicious of other people. Jean Paul Sartre once said that “Hell is other people” and until now I’ve never quite agreed with him. Now I understand a little more as we look out on the green and see huge groups of young people having fun while we feel isolated and left out. It’s not easy to accept the burdensome designation of “old people”. A couple of days ago we passed a stranger on the stairs and – because the security gates are broken and we’ve had all sorts of people digging through the rubbish and even smoking crack down there , Madame said -“Hi have you just moved in?”. Later he told his girlfriend (who we know quite well), that he’d been “challenged on the stairs by an old couple”.

Another cost of the pandemic is the lingering fear of illness and even death – it’s nebulous and fugitive but it’s there alright. We say to one another “I don’t think I’d manage very well without you” and the thought is so terrifying we change the subject immediately. But we’ve had to accept that so far as vaccination is concerned we’re in one of the highest risk groups. It’s changed the way people look at us in the streets – it seems that old age could – in and of itself – be contagious. I want to get a T shirt printed with “don’t worry my dear – old age isn’t catching”. I already own one with “I’m not old, I’m just very experienced!”

“Why me?” I think to myself – “I haven’t nearly finished yet” – but society seems to want to put me in my place; to stick me in a rocking chair on the verandah where I’m supposed to suck my teeth and tell the same story over and over. I’m supposed to hold all manner of retrogressive beliefs which, in truth, I’ve never had; and some younger people feel quite at liberty to believe that they invented childbirth, sex and environmental concern.

So this was a low point to begin a day working on the campervan which, for us, has been a source of liberation and freedom. We don’t so much go on holiday as go on field trips; carrying (but never burdened) with field guides, maps, cameras, camera trap and laptops. Its mere existence has kept us going through some dark times because it stands for something unequivocally good. It’s one of the few transitional objects (to nick a psychoanalytic concept) that we share between us. The best thing about a campervan is that you’re on holiday from the moment you settle into the driver’s seat. However, yesterday the van had other ideas and we couldn’t get it going. The battery was flat beyond the capability even of a 1000 amp emergency starter battery. So we connected the flattie to the generator 12V output and got it breathing again while I pumped up the tyres with the racing bicycle pump I’ve always used. Van tyres need 65 psi and so it’s great exercise normally, but my breathless failure to notice the sharp corner of an open window above my head cost me a black eye and a lot of blood. “I’m getting too old for this” slipped from my mouth; a greased weasel word if ever there was one, and dark thoughts of selling the van were shared as Madame mopped up the effusion of black bile.

So by the time we got home I was comatose with sadness about getting old; in fact we hardly exchanged a word in twenty miles. Losing the van on top of everything else would be like having our escape tunnel collapse. Visions of ‘old person’ conversations with well meaning social workers about whether “she” could rise unaided from a chair, finance officers who would means test you for the cost of a sandwich, occupational therapists and their confidence sapping paraphernalia of commodes and bath handrails, and deliveries of frozen ready meals – all stalked my imagination. “Do not go gentle into that good night” echoed around the my mind as I failed miserably to get to sleep.

Later I remembered the dramatic resolution to a long haunting by the black dog when I was in my twenties. This might be a bit counterintuitive but I was thrown into deep depression by the death of a friend – actually I hardly knew him but he was a close friend of Madame and he died of testicular cancer. The black dog sloped away one grey day when I realized that it was perfectly true that I was dying, but my inevitable death was not yet. There is a precious gap between the present moment and the inevitable end which is ours to fill in any way that we choose. Truth to tell, I don’t need to give a flying f*** (with a triple backflip) what anyone else chooses to think of me. I am not bound by the colossally limp expectations of others.

And so we rose early and drove back to the van with a rescue plan that worked first time and charged the battery so the van is ready for an adventure. We might even take the kayak. Then we drove home again and had a wonderful barbeque on the allotment with our youngest who refused to give us a hug until we’ve had our second jab – but said he wished he could! The sun shone in its least ironic manner, not to taunt us with our mortality but to warm our bones and it was good. In fact it was very good!

It’s not all turtle soup and silver spoons!

With thanks to Charles Dickens and Thomas Gradgrind for the reference – and we’ve no plans ever to serve or eat turtle soup at the Potwell Inn, with or without the silver spoons.

One of the abiding challenges of writing a blog about being human is the temptation to create a sunny and carefree parallel world in which my ever competent and cheerful alter ego glides effortlessly through life untouched by troubles of any kind. Of course it’s not like that at all and things go wrong all the time – like yesterday when the pride of my civil engineering efforts on the allotment collapsed under the weight of water we’d gathered from some intense rain. I’ve written so often about the water storage project that I should have known it would all come back and bite me and now it has. I could see something was amiss when we came down the path and I saw that the three 250 litre water barrels, instead of standing in a perfect and level line, were leaning over drunkenly against the shed which, having distorted significantly, resisted any attempt to open it. One of the supports had collapsed under the strain of 750Kg of water and the horrible result was all too clear.

It was the crowning glory, or perhaps more honestly the last straw, because the black dog had already been following me around all day. I don’t know why -perhaps it was something to do with revisiting my past; but the mud and silt at the bottom of my inner pond had been stirred up by going to Rodway Common, and I couldn’t quite find the way out of my thoughts. The sight of the water butts moved me into a silence.

Melancholy isn’t just a middle class word for depression, tarted up to make it sound a bit poetic. Melancholy is a mind frame through which all the impermanence and fragility of the world is magnified, and these last months have carried the risk of loss so gravely that there can’t be many of us who haven’t been touched by it. Some will have fallen into depression, which is far, far worse. For the Potwell Inn, of course, the prospect of the landlord sunk in a grey mist did not inspire the landlady, and the lounge bar was as quiet as a funeral director’s waiting room. The television, leaking its poison into the room, drove me to my desk where I got stuck in the mud, wheels spinning and going nowhere. Then, after a disturbed night in which dreamed of being able to fly, I woke up feeling better and in possession of my lyrical mind once more, and also an easy way of rebuilding the water butt structure.

The last six words of any dying organisation are – “we always do it this way“

What is it about the television at the moment? Endless costume dramas reinvent the past; we’ve got Jane Austin and Downton Abbey (was there ever a more unctuously dishonest series?) – coming out of our ears; and last night Countryfile – welly telly at its middle England finest – tried to present the argument that the gene editing of food crops was not the same as genetic modification. I screamed at the screen fruitlessly – “ask the question you moron!” – knowing that no serious question would be asked. The NFU will get its five minutes as the trades union of intensive farming, and there will be no mention of the adaptability of so-called pests. As Darwin said, when the merde hits the fan, it’s the most adaptable that survive (I paraphrase slightly) and that suggests that the odds are stacked against the farmers who will still be waiting for the Seventh Cavalry to come and rescue them when the better adapted blackfly have eaten their wellingtons. Just to put it simply, gene editing is the same game as genetic modification and carries many of the same dangers; and the thought of negotiating around a supermarket between rows of genetically edited carrots and chlorinated chicken does not fill me with joy.

On the allotment we concentrate on building up the soil and we know that stronger plants resist pests and diseases better than intensively farmed weak ones. Yes we get pea moth still, but we get around that by cropping them earlier. Blackfly and ladybirds sometimes take a week or two to move into synchronisation but they always do in the end, and there are a multitude of healthy ways of controlling pests -companion planting, for instance – that can work at scale as well. We often used to joke that the last six words of any dying organisation are – “we always do it this way“. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this Covid 19 pandemic, it’s that always doing it this way is the problem, and doing more of it can never provide a solution.

In my darkest moments I wonder whether the human race even deserves to survive, but we have children and grandchildren and there are millions of poor people around the world who will suffer even more than they do already, if we cling to the old ways which – in truth – are barely a couple of hundred years old in any case.

So there we are- no longer Mr Sad but definitely Mr Grumpy – and when it stops raining and I fix the water storage it will be Mr Sunny all over again; and the regulars will ask “what’s he on?” as I pull pints and sing “round and round the mulberry bush” .