Tag: diversity

Délicieux

Délicieux – “delicious” in English apart from its normal usage is also the title of a 2021 French/Belgian comedy-drama film directed by Éric Besnard, which charts the rise of the first restaurants in France just before the French revolution. We watched it a couple of nights ago and allowing for the odd historical inaccuracy, like moving the action from Paris to the Auvergne region, charts the fall of the aristocratic elite of the day and the subsequent redeployment of hundreds of highly trained chefs into parts of France that had no tradition of eating other than at home in the family setting. It’s a great film, up there with my other foodie favourites because sometimes when we’re sick to death of the murderous and cynical events on the news we need a couple of hours of relief. And it’s always good in any case to see the ruling classes humiliated and shamed even if it’s only in a film. Well worth watching and under a fiver.

Anyway, it made me sit up and remember how and why I started cooking in the first place. Mum was a decent cook with a small repertoire of favourites. By the time Madame and I got together I’d never tasted garlic, green peppers or any of what the supermarkets still describe as exotic vegetables. So when we moved into our first flat; I was 21 and Madame was 18, neither of us had considered how we were going to feed ourselves. I’d hovered in the kitchen and watched my mum cook; she showed me how to judge the thickness of Yorkshire pudding batter by the sound it makes, and I could make a passable bacon sandwich. My dad literally could not make a cup of instant coffee! Madame still can’t recall her mother ever cooking a meal and so confronted with starvation we agreed to take it in turns to cook and that’s never changed.

At the same time we were exposed for the first time to a different cuisine as soon as we went to college and started to meet new people from different social backgrounds who invited us to their homes and whose parents (who probably thought of us as amusing waifs and strays) invited us to eat with them. I fell in love with the whole thing but we could never have afforded to eat out, so the only way we could eat like our better off friends was to learn to cook. I bought books, slowly accumulated a few pans and after walking miles looking for ingredients, practiced. It never occurred to me to train as a chef; my whole ambition was to be a good cook. There was a shop around the corner that sold cookware and I would spend hours looking through the window at the Le Creuset pots. I bought my first ever carbon steel knife there and resolved never to make-do with inferior equipment – which meant that my skills and equipment were glacially slow to improve. It was decades before we could afford to travel and see continental food at first hand.

Our problem was that so many ingredients were simply unobtainable. We learned the location of bay trees, rosemary bushes and other herbs. Sage and thyme were only available in bunches as Christmas approached so we foraged for what we needed in the leafy streets and gardens and eventually got ourselves our first allotment. It’s a well rehearsed truth that olive oil could only be obtained in tiny bottles at the chemist. Luckily we had a deli nearby, run by a Hungarian refugee who imported foods we’d never seen or even dreamed of. We learned to grow some food and we were lucky enough to find neighbours who could show us how to dress the chickens, pheasants and rabbits that found their way to our door. The local butcher showed me how to humanely kill and pluck a chicken. When I was a community arts worker I learned to be careful about expressing any food preferences, because some of the young men I worked with would go poaching to order.

Today we were sitting at the table shelling the borlotti beans to store for the winter. At lunchtime we had a tasting of several varieties of apple that we grow and ate chunky bread. After a dreadfully tough summer we were on the point of giving up the allotment but Madame kept the faith and we’re back on track once again preparing the ground for next season. Against all expectations the fruit crop; sweet apples, pears, plums, damsons and cookers has been the best ever. The borlotti crop was the largest yet and even the potatoes held fast in the ground right through the drought. Chard, spinach and most of the herbs survived too, with minimal watering. The tomatoes and peppers suffered in the polytunnel but now at last the rain has come and the water butts are slowly filling. Storage is easy but harvesting water is a bit more tricky. The greenhouse roof faces east and west, taking most of the weather pretty well. The water butts there fill quickest, but the shed roof slopes to the north and its three barrels are much slower to fill. So the trick is to pump water from the full barrels to the empty ones so that every drop is captured. I can see that the dramatic climate change we’re experiencing is not going to reverse any time soon and so droughts, extreme weather and storms need to be factored into our planning.

So now we ache in places we didn’t know existed, but we grow closer each time we go to the allotment. The shared physical work renders the gym subscription redundant and the mental challenge of planning it all is rewarded at this time of year in the kitchen and at the table, and there really is some kind of spiritual dimension to it. The news is terribly unsettling, and the uncaring viciousness of so many people provokes paranoia and despair; but somehow the simple act of plunging your hands into the soil, or sowing and harvesting your own food have the strange capacity to heal those hurts. Our friendships among the other allotmenteers brings us together in a shared interest with a huge range of people and skills. Doctors; nurses; teachers and professors muck in with many others with quite different life experiences. The allotments are, in the truest sense, a university.

Mindfulness. “Walking in nature rather than through it”

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

Henry Reed, “Naming of parts” 1942

I love the way that, when I’m writing, images and ideas surface in my mind. My first thought when I sat down to write this post was that these four Cranesbills would have been exactly the species which inspired William Morris in his designs. Next I pondered for a while (it’s 5.00am after a sleepless night) on the extraordinary fact that in nature these closely related species are so plentiful. Do we really need twelve of them (Harrap’s “Wild Flowers”). Colin French’s “Flora of Cornwall” lists 34 species and subspecies; such an abundance that the only possible conclusion is that abundance, excess and diversity are somehow hardwired into nature. To return to a previous thought, if Nature is structured like a language then this abundance represents the dialects; the regional and environmental inflections of the same idea – like each one of us; all (potentially) beautiful if only we could break out of the prison we create when we each see ourselves as the only show in town.

And then Henry Reed’s poem plopped into my mind and I had the clearest recollection of myself in my early teens, sitting in a hot and airless classroom and gazing longingly out of the window as our teacher struggled to interest us in this poem. Not me, though. The poem sold itself to me in an instant. Here was another human being, feeling exactly like me at that moment and I took it to constitute permission to daydream. I’m quite sure that our teacher had no such aim in mind, but that’s the dangerous and disruptive power of poetry.

Peacock butterfly resting on a Charlock plant.

I’m indebted to Alan Rayner, by the way, for the idea of walking in nature rather than through it. It came up during a long conversation on a Bath Natural History Society field outing when we were overtaken by a runner pounding by us and seeing nothing at all. This last fortnight the experience repeated itself endlessly as we stood and watched a Kestrel hovering, or knelt in the grass delicately uncovering Spring Squills or – in this specific instance paused to photograph no less than four species of Geranium along a quarter of a mile of sunken lane bordered on both sides by Cornish walls as butterflies jazzed around tracing marvellous curlicues in pursuit of rivals, mates or nectar.

Without that special kind of relaxed mindfulness none of this diversity would have been visible. I suppose you could go out after a specific quarry – some rare or interesting plant – and cover more ground – eventually dragging your photographic elk back to the cave; but my favourite way of walking in nature is to move slowly, turning up all the senses to ten and let the plants do the talking. I’m not sure what practical use this kind of meditation has, other than cleansing the mind of thoughts about the endless dishonesty and stupidity of some politicians or the grinding anxiety that all this beauty is being threatened by the greed and selfishness of war and oil. Perhaps that’s the link with the poem about sitting in a stuffy room and learning how to assemble and fire a rifle in the context of the Second World War.

A wild Strawberry ripening on the warm top of a wall

Looking, seeing and beholding seem to me to constitute a hierarchy of mindful attention. For all the superficial similarities, each one of the Cranesbills is quite distinct. The shape of the leaves, for instance is crucial; compare the deeply incised lace-like divisions of the Cut-leaved Cranesbill in the larger photograph with the more modest Dove’s-foot Cranesbill in the centre of the strip of three to the left. Notice the fern like leaf of Herb Robert and the unusually pale flowers of the other * Dove’s-foot Cranesbill – each one an expression of the irrepressible creativity of Nature, and each one asking of us to name them because naming something – in a strange but powerful way – brings it into existence for us. The more we can name, the bigger the world becomes and the more intense our relationship with it. Even the word “Cranesbill” tells us something about the history of our language. If you look at the forming seed behind the flower at the top left – the Herb Robert – you might see the resemblance to a bird’s head and beak. But when was the last time that the sight of a Crane (the bird, I mean) was sufficiently commonplace to attach its name to a plant? Some centuries, I guess!

So it was farewell to Cornwall on Wednesday as we woke early and packed the campervan. This time we were on the Roseland peninsula, a very different place from the Lizard and a very different feel to the natural history as well. But we’ve already booked to return in September. Curiously, we were talking to our allotment neighbour when we got back and we discovered that without ever meeting one another we had been staying on the same campsite for over a decade. He was planning to drive down today for the half-term week. It’s a small world – worryingly and vulnerably small!

Back home, though, we turn our full attention to the allotment which – thanks to some good neighbours – survived the very hot weather, but urgently needs weeding and TLC.

*I submitted just one of what I initially thought were four species to the local BSBI Recorder – the marvellously skilled Ian Benallick for verification – and he corrected my identification earlier today, so apologies for any apoplexy caused by my mistake. His kind correction led me to double check all my ID’s in Tim Rich and A C Jermy’s “Plant Crib”. Geraniums, it seems, are a difficult group. Yet another example of the way we learn so much more from our mistakes than we do from our successes.

Having enjoyed every moment of sunshine on holiday, we spent some of today working at 35 C in the polytunnel which is now almost planted up with summer residents and looks lovely.

Towan Beach

Early blight?

Yesterday we were woken at 6.30am by the kind of groaning and grinding noises that you just know are not being generated by migrating birds or horny foxes. We’re slowly but relentlessly being gentrified here. In the past five years there has barely been a day that wasn’t accompanied by pile drivers, heavy equipment, jackhammers, scaffolders and speculators, who aren’t noisy but then, neither are covid viruses. We welcome our new neighbours, mostly wealthy absentee buy to let landlords who have slowly but surely blotted out every glimpse of the surrounding hills with their babel towers. The arrival of the cranes is the first clue we get as to the eventual height of their monstrous invasion. We protest to the planners, but these companies have big budgets and the legal artillery to beat down any local authority that dares to reject their advances. We are bombarded with emailed sweeteners that promise much but never deliver because they can wriggle out of their commitment to community infrastructure by paying a pitifully small sum into the cash strapped council’s account – on the grounds that they can’t make a big enough profit if they actually build all those promised schools, surgeries and community centres.

By way of absolute contrast see this –

This is our allotment site. To the left you can see the approaching armies of moloch. They would have us believe that their palaces of assisted community living for the wealthy are the way forward for a modern progressive city but I’m not even remotely convinced. These new buildings are bonded warehouses for etiolated souls.

the sounds of children doing something so vanishingly rare these days that I could see the moment being celebrated in a memoir many years down the line.

Yesterday also – but on the allotments – we experienced the glorious possibilities of The Commons. Anticipating the onset of spring by one day, and tempted by the glorious sunshine, the allotmenteers piled on to the site with spades and forks, picnics and children. Even the groaning of the cranes and the sirens of passing ambulances were unable to diminish the sounds of children doing something so vanishingly rare these days that I could see the moment being celebrated in a memoir many years down the line.

They were playing;

  1. Playing tag
  2. Making patterns with stones
  3. investigating ponds
  4. looking for frogspawn
  5. Making mud pies
  6. building dens
  7. building swings in a tree
  8. meeting school friends
  9. helping parents on allotments
  10. wheelbarrowing woodchip and leaves
  11. watching the grownups gardening
  12. learning how to thrive as humans
  13. even sowing a few seeds in their own garden patch

Many of the new allotmenteers live locally, often in gardenless flats, and know one another through their children at local primary schools – so they’re friends already and bring those friendships along to the site. Many of them are in front line occupations and their children are attending school in any case, but other parents have grabbed the opportunity offered by furlough to offer their children a much broader curriculum than barebones literacy and numeracy; introducing them to food production, natural history and getting to know a wider range of adults and our very different cultures than they would ever meet at school.

The allotmenteers represent the broadest spectrum of humans you could imagine. Just by walking down one footpath they might meet a lead trainer in gender diversity, a retired professor of French history, a retired vicar, several ex teachers, a professional musician, two nurses and a GP; male, female, straight gay and ‘haven’t a clue mate!” Not so long ago we had the retired director of the National Botanical Gardens of Wales. They might meet a Russian gardener, or someone from one of half a dozen Eastern European countries, several Afro Caribbeans who were born here or who’ve lived in Bath for longer than the vast majority of us; and an Indian national who’s travelled all over. Some of us are probably very well off and others not so, but we don’t worry to much about our differences and focus on what unites us, which is the love of gardening. It’s not perfect but it’s manageable.

During the afternoon, a fascinating pattern of distributed parenting developed where, without any obvious organisation (and certainly without a rota), responsibility for the children passed from adult to adult. The gates were locked by common consent and we all felt empowered to shoo them off if they were in danger of causing damage, without fear of reprisals from their mums and dads. When lockdown first started the whole site was tenanted very quickly and I think some of the younger ones worried that the old guard would not make them welcome. Eight months on and the integration of new members has been a blessing – they soon worked out that old age isn’t catching! The addition of children’s voices to the other wild sounds cheers everyone up.

When we – rather too easily – suggest that contact with nature is good for us, I’d suggest that the allotment offers a lot more to combat loneliness, isolation and poor mental health than any one off visit to a nature reserve. We are the new commons. The one place left that can give us access to a bit of shared land at an affordable rent; where a sense of community thrives organically rather than being organised by a committee of local councillors and property developers. For eighty quid a year we get not just our own fresh, organic produce; we get fresh air, exercise and access to a whole community of new friends. What you pay for is good, but what comes for free is priceless.

The penthouse flats in the riverside development cost over a million pounds. You can see the allotments from their balconies except it’s so windy up there you rarely see anyone using them. The roof garden is similarly empty for the same reason.

We don’t need any more unaffordable homes. We need allotments – lots of them – and soon; because they don’t just grow vegetables, they grow thriving human communities and happy human beings; and you can’t put a price on that – just a value.

Our improvised second stage seedling care – central heating and south facing window supplemented by a studio lamp with a daylight LED bulb.