Tag: economic collapse

By the rivers of Babylon. I need a word and only Welsh will do

The first basin on the K & A drained for maintenance today to the bewilderment of a heron.

Looking for a photo to kick this post off I did a search and was astounded at the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken in Welsh landscapes over the years but this one fell into my lap, walking along the Kennet and Avon canal in central Bath. There’s a bigger frame of reference than English can express and it coalesces around a wonderful Welsh idea; the concept of “hiraeth”. I hesitate to call it a word because its reach extends far beyond its seven letters.

Derived from hir (long) and aeth (grief/sorrow), it combines nostalgia with a sense of grief or longing and it is considered a cornerstone of Welsh identity, reflecting a longing for lost traditions, language, or landscape.  It refers to a deep, often melancholy longing for a home or time that cannot be revisited. (Google Gemini search)

I must add at the outset that I have a very limited knowledge of the Welsh language, but I learned to pronounce Welsh place-names when I was helping to run some worker-writer’s workshops in the valley towns several decades ago. Neither Ian, my co-worker or I had a car and so we did all our travelling by train and bus and to avoid entertaining the other passengers I managed to learn how to learn to pronounce Welsh place-names properly. When confronted with a destination like Ystradgynlais it paid dividends to know how to pronounce it – even if the rest of the conversation was in English. I was once even congratulated on my pronunciation by a Welsh speaking farmers wife on Lleyn and I long for the day when I’ll be brave enough to wish the shopkeeper good morning in Welsh somewhere in North Wales without the paralysing fear of being replied to in the same language. My old Greek tutor Gerry Angel always said there were only two languages in the world worth learning – Greek and Welsh – and I’ve never had enough time to learn Welsh until (perhaps) now. I eventually passed the (New Testament) Greek exam.

A language is the matrix in which the culture of a country and its people is contained, and it follows that there are certain ideas, emotions and concepts that can’t be translated except by severing them from their context, history and memory. It also follows that there are things that can be said in Welsh that can’t be said in English. Learning Welsh, it seems to me, would entail embedding myself in the whole history and culture of the land rather than mastering the superficial meaning of even a few thousand words.

I’m familiar with this in my own experience because my native English tongue is from Gloucestershire where – as a child – we still used “thee, you and thou” – a habit that the teachers did their best to beat out of us. Anyway, they’re a most useful set of words because they convey degrees of familiarity Like the French vou and tu leaving “you” with an association of hostility and suspicion. When I first went to work as a labourer in a steel erecting firm, I was always (young, dumb and hairy) addressed as “you”. We also had a version of what the linguists call a soft mutation which is very common in Welsh. For us, the tram roads carrying coal from Coalpit Heath were always known as “dram roads”. If you were encouraging someone from the sidelines it would be “go ‘ee’ – a shortened form of “thee”. You don’t learn any of these informal grammar rules through books, you learn them from use. I’ve told this story before, but I buy all our rough sawn wood for the allotment from a timberyard near where I was born. Just talking to the counter staff there is to be transported back to my own history and sense of place, so – going back to the beginning of that long excursus, “hiraeth” is the perfect word to describe that sense of loss. The thousands of acres of farmland I walked over and played on as a child are all built over. My childhood territory is dissected by a ring road and a motorway and the brickworks and pitheads have all, bar a few crumbling walls, disappeared along with out unique dialect and the last few miners have died. The abundant methodist chapels are gone or converted into fashionable homes for incomers. The railway lines have become cyclepaths – a muggers’ paradise; predators on unwary cyclists and walkers. The Pines Express no longer thunders through the triangular junction. There’s no way back. Without land, language, culture or memories we are adrift without even our own word to describe the melancholy of it.

I’ve just started reading a marvellous book by Carwyn Graves (grovelling apologies for getting both his name and gender wrong yesterday) – entitled “Tir” – the Welsh word embodying the associated meanings of land types within Wales. I’ve got both of his previous two books, “Welsh Food Stories” and “Apples of Wales” and they both approach their subjects through the prism of Welsh history and culture. “Tir” casts a ray of light on all sorts of puzzling phenomena around landscapes – for instance – why are so many Welsh farmers deeply suspicious of the idea of rewilding? The answer is compelling and fascinating and would serve admirably as a push-back against rewilding as an abandonment of thousands of years of farming history. I’ve still got some way to go before finishing reading about all seven types of landscape – each expressed in a different word. It’s a marvellous book and I can’t recommend it too highly. It’s sent me back to the maps and dictionaries I’ve bought over the years but never fully understood and it’s also sent me back to seriously considering learning the language.

After ten years of complaining to our landlord about damp and black mould in our concrete building they’ve finally agreed to start doing the remedial work; installing ventilation extractor fans and mould proofing the walls as well as making good the botched plastering in a couple of rooms. The work is going to take a week so we’re moving out and we’ve rented a cottage high up in the Bannau Brycheiniog near the top of the next valley along from the photo. It looks like absolute paradise – the long road up leads past an abandoned asylum and a nature reserve and sits below the highest peak in the Eastern range. We’ve walked it before and it’s not in the least pretty – a big bog with a stone in the middle – but there’s a walk leading down from it to the main road that’s absolutely breathtaking. I’ve already got my plant lists ready and organised thanks to Notebook LM which happily did the work of processing a heap of data. When in despair, make a list, learn a language, read a book. It works for me!

What a difference a day makes!

This view through the campervan door on consecutive days is a perfect cameo of Welsh weather. The patch of grass that’s visible on the right hand photo is just out of frame on the left. If you’re lucky you can make out the ridge of Talybont forest on the left whereas it’s clear on the right.

The campsite we stayed on is a place we’ve used several times. Right next to the canal it’s only a short distance to a place where we can easily launch the kayak, and we’re far from alone in seeing this as a perfect place for energetic walks and even more energetic bike routes over the hills on the Taff Trail. All day long the supremely fit come bowling into the campsite with their Volkswagen T5’s magnificent legs and haggard faces looking for all the world like sturdier versions of the crack smokers on the green outside the flat in Bath. I’ll get to them later.

Notwithstanding the physical challenges available, there’s also an awful lot of wildlife to be seen, although how you would get to experience any of it from the saddle of a bike is debatable. Ironically we saw more wildlife than we ever expected by just sitting still on the grass outside the van. There was a field mouse who took an hour to make his mind up and then shuttled back and forth collecting the crumbs we’d thrown down. He was sleek and almost chestnut in colour, quite beautiful. There were the two hedgehogs in the dusk and innumerable birds; sparrows, dunnocks, blackbirds, an amazing kingfisher bursting out of the hedge, buzzards, robins, wrens, blue tits, coal tits and woodpigeons – all seen without moving a step from the van. I was racking my brains to remember this line from W.H. Davies:

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

W.H. Davies “Leisure”

It’s a bit corny, but then I remembered its uncanny echo of Milton’s Sonnet 19 on his blindness “When I consider how my light is spent”, that ends –“They also serve who only stand and wait.” – there’s a real spiritual point to standing still and waiting, that challenges our cultural obsession with success, hard work, achievement.

So we’d run out of milk when we got home and I wandered down to the supermarket to get some. Sadly, since the fire at Green Park Station, the milk vending machine has been disconnected. As I walked back in the sunshine a loud argument was being conducted across me on the street. “I’m effing desperate, I am” screamed a woman at the obviously sick man who was just in front of me. She was forging on, head down in that characteristic junkie walk. He shouted back – “It’s just here at the end of the block”. I knew in a second that they were off to meet one of the several dealers who work this area and use the corner as a rendezvous point. Sure enough as I followed them to the end of the road they were there, with a mobile standing on the corner; she was still shouting needlessly into the receiver. Then two, three and four people turned up to join the queue. They have the hunted look of those who have been shriven by their lives, bent over like the trees on the ridge of Freezing Hill, parchment skinned, incoherent bog burials.

The deal was a messy affair in several acts. She borrowed some crack from someone in the queue and stormed over to the privacy of the bushes at the edge of the green where she shared a pipe with her benefactor and walked back miraculously calmed. Arguments broke out – there was shouting and swearing until the dealer cycled up and then for ten minutes noisy negotiations broke out. People stormed off and returned chastened; shouting, more shouting, a big man was throwing haymakers at an invisible enemy. There were dangerous looking dogs barking. Eventually she got her drugs and sat calmly in full view, injecting into her neck. She wandered off again into the woods and returned with a bicycle. It was sad; so appallingly sad, to see these ruined lives.

Blaming the victim is always cheaper

Where do you even begin to find a way through this mess? There’s a strong association with mental illness, homelessness and alcohol – any or all of which could be tackled if we chose to resource it, but blaming the victim is always cheaper. In a world without the prospect of employment, drug dealing looks like a rational choice where the most successful and profitable business are centred on greed and entirely disregard the consequences. The street is a dangerous place so getting a dangerous dog is a rational response once again. I was having a conversation with a financial advisor recently and he told me that if you’re simply interested in making money and don’t give a hoot for ethical investments, then oil and weapons are the star performers. The tanks, guns and landmines are just flying off the shelves. The same old saw comes back every time – “We have seen the enemy, it is us”.

And then I remember A F Woodman who was the music teacher who introduced me and so many others to music – the “brandy of the damned” – according to George Bernard Shaw; and I remember him shouting at me “I know you can hear it, Pole – but are you listening?”

I’m listening!

A Day Lily in our container garden outside the flat

Bread and circuses?

A Mallow beside Whitesands Bay – but which Mallow? definitely a three pipe problem which, for a non smoker, is a bit tricky!

This post, which is a bit of a change from my usual more lyrical writing, came after spending a couple of very happy hours going through my photographs and doing a bit of ID searching and cataloguing while I went along. I know it sounds very nerdy, and I suppose it is, but it always gives me intense pleasure – especially when I discover that I have already photographed a plant which I’ve only just learned how to identify. My collection of thousands of photographs is more than a library catalogue because each one recaptures a plant, a time and a place; it lights up my memory of events and places that might have happened years ago.

It was the appalling thought that these irreplaceably beautiful reminders of our vulnerable earthiness might not be available to our grandchildren that made my hackles rise. Field botany; the finding and mapping of plants is overwhelmingly done by volunteers like me (in my very small way). The more data we gather the more it becomes obvious that the rate of extinctions is accelerating and that more and more of the plants described in literature will no longer be found in a ruined environment. This is not an act of some invisible and spiteful god but the inevitable consequence of the deranged relationship of the wealthy countries with the earth. I use the word deranged thoughtfully because it seems to me that it’s only what’s known as cognitive dissonance – our ability to obscure and tolerate the yawning chasm between our beliefs and our aspirations – that stops us from rising up in rage against this cruel extractive and exploitative regime.

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

Juvenal 2nd Century Roman poet – in Satire 10; 77-81

When Juvenal wrote this he was not so much criticising the Roman elite as raging at the way the mass of people preferred free food and lots of violent and bloody spectacle rather than engage in their civic duty and responsibility; and – sadly – it’s not difficult to see a parallel between the declining Roman Empire and our own times. Our society is in terminal decay with corruption, greed and institutional lying, obscured by the salacious reporting of sexual scandals in the media.

So at what point does our capacity to believe Mother Julian, that “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well”, break down? When will our hearts finally rebel in the face of the incontrovertible evidence of catastrophic climate change, economic collapse, and hunger? How much longer can the final demands pile up in the hallway before we – the people – demand better? The bread is becoming unaffordable and the circus is a seedy porn show so – something has to break soon.

But just when we need visionary leaders, we get lumbered with two main parties who seem to be neck and neck in a feeblest platitude competition; staring into the abyss with their political telescopes firmly planted on their blind eyes. Personally I wouldn’t vote for either of them if the only other candidate was a dead sheep. The present electoral system has been so rigged by the powerful that without urgent reform the lights will go out while they’re still organising the agenda for a preparatory discussion among five of their mates. But we need not (must not) resort to cudgels or any form of violence. Bernard Lonergan came up with a list of seven virtues which we should try to live out ourselves in order that we can demand them from our politicians. As I write them out I’m astonished at how naive they sound and yet … here they are from Wikipedia:

“be humble, be hospitable, be merciful, be faithful, reconcile, be vigilant, and be reliable”

Bernard Lonergan

Or to take a more traditional approach – and I’m sorry that both these examples come from Christian teaching:

Justice; Temperance; Prudence; Fortitude

Or to take a Buddhist view of the virtues:

loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity

I could go on but suffice it to say that almost all religious faiths, not to mention atheism and agnosticism will come up with a very similar group of virtues. This isn’t something that confines itself to the religious or those capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast; and here it might be wise to remember that there’s abundant scientific evidence that those who do easily believe those six impossible things are utterly immune to evidence – which only seems to strengthen their belief; as witnessed by those groups who withdraw to the desert to await the end of time who, when it fails to materialise, blame themselves for calculating it wrong: or indeed those brexiters who say the problem isn’t that it was a terrible idea but that it was badly implemented!

Politicians have one point of vulnerability which – even with the help of the largely supine media – they cannot conceal. If we refuse to vote for the charlatans, the delusional, the liars and half-wits and lend our votes to the most virtuous (people displaying the qualities I’ve listed above) then it’s sending a clear message to them all that we demand change and won’t tolerate backsliding on promises at the behest of paid lobbyists. Neither of the two main parties in the UK meet those criteria and so I’m happy to say I won’t vote for them but I will vote for the candidates who embrace earth-first policies and are prepared to change the electoral system so that it can deliver the policies we need to avoid catastrophe. He have to elect leaders who walk the walk and not merely talk the talk.

Maybe the Ragwort and the Cinnabar moth stand more chance of surviving than we do!

A genuine first for me – I’ve seen opium harvesting on the allotments!

I thought I was pretty much bomb proof after my years working with extremely marginalized people, but this one took me completely by surprise. We were walking up from our plot last night after shutting the greenhouse and the polytunnel when Madame spotted a young man, in his late twenties or early thirties crouching on a neighbouring allotment. I asked him what he was doing and he answered rather unconvincingly that he was taking photographs. I couldn’t see a camera and judging by his whole appearance he was more likely to be a drug user nicking strawberries or soft fruit – he had that hollowed out sallow look and couldn’t even be arsed to make a plausible excuse. How did I make that rather harsh judgement? – well experience I suppose.

Anyway he wandered off and climbed back over the gate and I thought no more of it until this morning when we went back to work and I took a look at the spot he’d been crouching in. There were neither strawberries nor any other edibles anywhere near where he’d been but there were poppies and it took no more than a glance to figure out that what he’d been up to was cutting seed heads to get the milky sap which is the precursor to most of the dangerous drugs in the world, and mother to the crime that is endemic to the trade in drugs.

But I’m not accusing this poor young man of being some kind of drug baron because clearly he is one of the victims. It’s when that sticky white sap is scraped off the seed heads and pressed into dark brown balls that it enters the drug trade. I suspect that his intention was to scrape a little sap and then smoke it in a pipe; inhaling some of the fifty alkaloids which include heroin, morphine and cocaine but heaven knows what other poisons. A few minutes escape, perhaps, from a dreadful life or perhaps a misjudged permanent escape.

Is the economy now an object of worship to which we must sacrifice human lives?

Of course we could do more to help, but listening to the news at lunchtime today, the government seem to be saying that another 100,000 people thrown out of work is a price we have to pay to stabilize the economy. Grenfell and Covid suggest a rebalancing of the economy based on the sacrifices of the weakest in society and the continuing enrichment of the already wealthy . Somehow the shaming of Johnson has not made me as happy as I’d hoped. Now we see the problem, and it’s a metastasising tumour for which the only cure is to root out the intolerance and indifference to suffering that feeds it.

Here at the Potwell Inn we see the results every day. Notwithstanding the eagerness of the local businesses and the Council to project an image of Bath as the place where history comes to life; here in this neglected ward so close to the city centre we see how badly the dreams of Bridgerton and Jane Austin unravel in the harsh light of neoliberal economics. In a world of transcendental beauty – if you know where to find it – the rats still fight over fast food litter – and slavery, however modern, still stalks the earth; out of sight, and so out of mind. The drug dealers still gather on the corner of the Green to sell their wares, the street beggars pass us morning and night as they return to their shelters – and the deranged, denied any proper mental health support, howl at one another and at the skies with inarticulate rage. But I would argue that we are fortunate to live in a place where the contradictions are so cruelly exposed because, however painful it might be, we can’t look away.

The young man on the allotment is not the folk demon crackhead; but the political and economic culture which has trodden him down to such a desperate and vulnerable state is the true work of the devil, where vice masquerades as virtue and evil wears a suit and handmade shoes. Three calamities – the climate emergency, the environmental emergency and the economic emergency are the unholy trinity at the root of all these phenomena and confining our response to saving a few rare species, recycling, going vegan and buying a bike just won’t do. It takes will and determination and – as Ukraine demonstrates – courage to rise to the challenge and resist.

This is beginning to look like my Mother’s siege larder.

Another day on the stove, processing, stirring, sieving, tasting, bottling and so forth. Obviously not all of the stores in the photo were made this week – in fact some of them were made three years ago, but ignoring all advice from the recipe books we’ve found that chutneys, pickles and ketchups – provided they’re properly sealed and sterilized – will go on improving for years. The only proviso is that if you’re planning on keeping them that long you need to use Kilner type jars with rubber seals or acid resistant Ball types. Metal lidded pickles often evaporate or deteriorate and the lids will even rust through occasionally. The mugwort, collected in 2019, is said to provoke lucid dreams. My dreams are so surreal and occasionally scary that I’ve never thought greater lucidity would be much of an improvement.

The flat is full of spice and cider vinegar smells as I make 3 litres of tomato ketchup, and while I take a break to write this, Madame is cooking a batch of ratatouille. Against all the odds we seem to coexist peacefully enough in the kitchen as long as we don’t attempt to share the stove.

So why the urge to preserve? Well, part of it I’m sure is an atavistic re-enactment of childhood. My Mother and Grandmother had both lived through the hardship of two world wars and Madame’s Grandmother also was a gardener and a good cook. My grandparents’ smallholding in the Chilterns was as self sufficient as it was possible to be, and one of my earliest memories is of being with my sister, raking the hay into stooks on one of the fields. The rake was probably twice as tall as me!

But apart from that, after two years of lockdown shortages and in the midst of a massive cost of living crisis there’s every reason to do all we can to grow, prepare and store as much food as possible because it seems obvious that no help will ever come from the present government. Then again we also love cooking for ourselves, our family and friends too, and slow food, locally and organically produced isn’t some kind of middle class affectation, it’s the way we need to go. The present system of food production and distribution is simply unsustainable without further damaging the earth, her climate and biodiversity. Local and sustainable is a potential lifesaver and yes, we’ll need to embrace a rather different lifestyle but what’s to say it might not be better, richer and more fulfilling for a far greater proportion of our population.

That said, it’s pretty relentless hard work even being a part time peasant, but against all the odds we’ve had a good year on the allotment and we’ve harvested a bit more of most of our regular crops in spite of the drought. I took the photograph of these dying Harts Tongue ferns in a friend’s garden – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sight like this before. It doesn’t take a genius to see that these extreme weather events will have a huge effect on food crops and therefore prices in general. Do we really want to live in a society where a few people live in utter luxury while many others are struggling to feed their children. I went to a supermarket earlier this week to get some eggs. We try to buy organic and free range eggs but when I looked at the price I saw that they were charging £6.00 a dozen for them. That’s frightening – so frightening I didn’t buy any.

The last 7 days have been truly odd. Last Thursday we went up to Birmingham to celebrate Madame’s birthday with our son and his partner; but first the car broke down and then there was a rail strike (which we completely support by the way. My father was a railwayman who spent his whole working life in fear of redundancy), and so we took the bus.

I love Birmingham but the bus station in Digbeth gives a pretty awful impression of the city. The whole area looks run down and ready for demolition in spite of a multitude of small businesses from car repairs to import export firms and money transfer shops. Exactly the kind of businesses you usually find occupying the lock-ups under railway arches, and in spite of the bleak surroundings they seemed to be getting by.

The buses were running late due to holiday traffic on the motorway and so we were able to see an entirely different side of the Second City away from the more glamorous centre. Fifteen years ago the centre of Birmingham had a very different feel; self confident, almost brash, with plenty of big-name stores. Now it’s different. There are all the usual signs of economic stress with empty shops in many of the principal shopping streets- even the John Lewis store has departed the Bullring. The Museum and Art Gallery, however, still has a radical agenda that makes it such a joy to visit. Where else in Britain would you see exhibitions devoted to Trades Union activism, Black Lives Matter, and even raves and club life in the 70’s. Industry is celebrated, not least by remembering the small workshops that sprang up everywhere- servicing larger industries like the now defunct car manufacturers. You get the feeling that by standing firm and facing down its undeniably racist episodes the city has begun to come to terms with the past. There’s an unapologetic multicultural community that doesn’t feel the need to tread carefully. The city centre gets rebuilt every decade – so there’s still money somewhere – and the Clean Air Zone along with decent public transport including trams to Wolverhampton, suggest that the spirit of Joseph Chamberlain has not quite been monetized and sold off to the asset managers. The biggest problems, though, are not in the past but in the present.

Standing and chatting to some of the other passengers in the queue for the National Express bus home, you could see the stress eating into their lives. Plato said that the city is a work of art, but he was wealthy and well educated and I doubt if he ever queued up amongst hoi polloi to see what was troubling them. For most people the city is less a work of art and more a ransom note. I chatted for ages to a young woman, looking fantastic, who was going for four days to a holiday camp near Brean in Somerset with her daughter who never once looked up from her iPad and her mother who never stopped talking on her mobile. In ten minutes I had the bare bones of her life as she talked about her dad, now dead but a hero to her – and her ex partner Dave, who’d cleared off – and as she spoke I felt that her holiday was an expensive lottery ticket to a more hopeful future. Later, after the weary queue for the late Weston Super Mare bus had departed I sat down and overheard a young woman behind me talking about her unexpected pregnancy at the age of 14 and how she’d been completely unaware of it until the ambulance crew spotted what was happening. I prayed silently and without much faith, that things would look up for them both.

Then, on Saturday I had my biennial (actually a year late) endoscope, to check that some rogue cells in my oesophagus hadn’t mutated into something really nasty and well, subject to an 8 week delay on the biopsies, it seems that everything is OK for now. However this regular brush with my own mortality through a very invasive procedure always has a profound effect on me. Luckily, after a day of being legally over the limit and confined to bed for most of it, on Sunday we went to see Carters Steam Fair which is always great fun. Being pretty ancient myself, it’s fascinating to reconnect with the fairground rides that I remember from childhood. Steam and grease and old rock and roll records have a fatal attraction for me as I remember the Rogers family and the Hills who took it in turns to visit Page Park and Rodway Hill. Sadly the Naughty Nineties girls with the free for all boxing booth will never reveal themselves to me because the girls are now in their nineties and the local ruffians who once fancied their chances in the ring will all be dead. The grandchildren shared none of these mournful thoughts as they embraced the fairground joyfully and ate candyfloss between the dizzying rides.

During all this to and fro, I finished reading Carwyn Graves’ excellent new book “Welsh Food Stories”. His previous book “Apples of Wales” is essential reading for anyone thinking of planting an orchard. The names of the varieties alone – Pig Snout and Goose Arse are just two – are a delight to the poet’s ear! I long for the day when you don’t need to be a food researcher to find fine local produce. At the moment, for many people, the future of food is like an unfinished building, because we know something about what the structure needs to be but hardly anything about what it will look and feel like. Books like “Welsh Food Stories” address the lack of a sustainable food culture by filling in some of the pictures.

Economics and the Prophets of Baal

The Littleton Wassail – January 2020

Bear with me on the title of this post, but the Old Testament contains a glorious collection of stories which I’ve pressed into service many times in the course of a long and (as far as the bishops are concerned) disreputable mission to make them comprehensible in a very different context. That’s what writers do! we nick stories from all over the place and put them to service in a new way. I well remember hearing one of the team of writers who create scripts for “Eastenders” admit that they often took a storyline from the Bible, or the Greek myths, or indeed William Shakespeare. In fact; if your subject is adultery, incest and murder you need look no further than the Old Testament.

Having spent some of the week studying Basil Bunting’s often obscure poem “Briggflatts” I feel obliged to say that I’m not using the story in an attempt to look better educated than I really am. I first heard it from the lips of Primitive Methodist lay preachers who delighted in nothing better than a bit of smiting, and this story of a battle between Elijah the Prophet and 450 of the prophets of the Canaanite God, Baal, was a positive gorefest as – having won a bet on whose god could light a bonfire with a lightning bolt – he slaughtered his opponents in a merciless display of “righteousness.” The irony of the story and the reason for the fact that I’m pinning a post on it is that Baal was the God of fertility (crops mainly but probably a bit of the other thing as well), and also sun, rain and storm with a side hustle of war. The point of this meandering introduction is to explain that considering the probable fate of the earth if we don’t get off our collective bottoms and do something dramatic; you might see this as an appropriate moment to reinvent Baal. After all his CV includes dominion over crops, sun, rain and war. Exactly the portfolio of challenges facing our next Prime Minister. Job done – next question please!

However half the fun of the story is that Elijah was so sure he was on the right side, he demanded that huge quantities of water should be poured on his pile of sticks before getting down to serious prayer. The Prophets of Baal, equally certain of their own God, danced around the bonfire, making their noisy invocations for what may well have been hours, before Elijah stood up with a swift one-liner to his God who obligingly sent the thunderbolt – that was meant to be Baal’s gig! Cue smoke, flames and a lot of smiting until the 450 were all dead.

Or were they?

It seems to me that the Prophets of Baal might – in a spooky way – be the direct ancestors of our present generation of economists. It’s perfectly fair to accuse them (and many of us) of worshipping the economy. We speak of it reverentially, as if it were some kind of supernatural entity which rewards its priesthood and smites its detractors. ‘Who will ignite the economy?’ we ask, and the economists who all speak the same arcane, almost liturgical language, step forward from the shadows and begin their little dance around the way we do things round here which is clearly breathing its last stertorous breaths; the so-called death rattle of the verities. As they circle the corpse they whirl and chant like Sufi dancers and sing of profit and loss, of efficiency and margins while others chalk obscure mathematical formulae around the victim. But the victim does not rise because economics has never learned to speak of fertility, of crops and sun and rain. Its reductive ideology has excluded almost every ethical and human consideration; aside from the costs and opportunities of war in pounds sterling. In the face of their failure they fall silent; their instruments slip from their bloodless hands; the rain washes their dismal formulae away.

Painted with the brush of objective science and rationality and enveloped in the mythology that there is no alternative, mainstream economics continues, with great effect, to cleanse our ecological crisis of its profoundly political origins and resolutions.

Adrienne Buller “The Value of a Whale. On the illusions of Green Capitalism” 2022 Manchester University Press, Page 51

It happens all the time, of course. The gods of unintended consequences have brought the economists low because they mistook their theological assumptions for science. While they snorted with derision at determinist philosophies, and knuckled their heads in disbelief at Marxism; they developed their very own iron laws. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. What these new prophets of Baal couldn’t grasp was that by excluding any consideration of relationship; by refusing to include human thriving – which is itself a relational concept; and by failing to notice that the earth is not a resource but a finely balanced ecosystem – they were not worshipping Baal, but Moloch – the god of child sacrifice.

The storm that’s coming

So what I’d rather be writing is a bit of a lamentation about the fact that our good friend the badger – about whom I wrote so warmly only two days ago – managed to limbo past the upturned crates and multiple bits of chicken wire, sheep wire, and underneath the lowest branches of a cordon apple to get right into the middle of the three sisters experiment where he must have sat his fat bottom on top of a squash plant whilst munching a couple of our cobs. The fencing – in the traditional British allotment style – was a bit too haphazard for this crafty and heavyweight poacher who must have laughed out loud as he scoffed our food. Nevertheless we shall love him through gritted teeth because he’s family now; a bit like a teenage boy (we had three) who can empty a fridge without opening the door. Anyway enough selfish angst! because right now the badger is the least of our worries.

And precisely how big does a worry have to be to be considered an existential worry anyway? Both two and four legged poachers and browsers are a problem, but I don’t wake up in a bewildered daze dreaming about them at five in the morning. It seems a bit overblown to react so strongly to the three greatest challenges of our age – our economic structure, our climate emergency and the mass extinction of creatures, the very existence of which we are often unaware. And yet ……..

“Your tears of frustration are important to us, please call again”

This week we’ve seen (and experienced in person in one case) – floods, unseasonable storms, drought and enormous forest fires and yet our government not only seems unprepared – but unwilling to engage seriously at all with the coming storm. I’d love to be able to write lyrically about the allotment; its minor setbacks and little triumphs. I’d love to think that if enough of us got into gardening the crisis would disappear; but it’s not true. It’s not possible to sort the mess out without mending our broken politics; kicking out the grifters, the panderers, the greedy, the entitled and the downright lame. If I wake at night it’s because it seems as if there’s no-one at the wheel. “Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” is what being on-message seems to mean. Panglossian optimism is being broadcast on every print and broadcast medium followed by the small rider – “This is a recorded message – your tears of frustration are important to us, please try again”.

Well everything is not for the best at all, but thinking at the national and international level just sucks the oxygen out of my brain. With the clowns in charge you’d be looking for a very large miracle indeed. So is there a way through without suffering paralysis or indulging in pointless gestures? Think ……. neighbourhood; district; town; county; region; parliament? At which word did your eyes glaze over?

We live in Bath. The problems here are not so different from the problems elsewhere. We have the challenge of tourism which the local authority seems to treasure above any other possible economic activity. We have an enormous problem with housing, poverty, homelessness, overstretched healthcare and traffic – the really big one. Every one of these issues arises as we progress through my hierarchy of authorities, but the chance of making a real difference is far greater at the local level. Let’s take food distribution as an example. If we really want to increase locally sourced food with minimum transportation we can campaign locally for farmers markets and more – many more – smallholdings and allotment sites. Local politicians find it much harder to ignore issues that are raised by voters when they are face to face with us. Our part of the solution is to support the new ways and not endlessly snipe at them via social media because we might be mildly inconvenienced by not being allowed to park our Range Rovers on the pavement outside the shops. They put warnings and lurid photos of tumours on cigarette packets; why not on cars?

Can I just spell this out for the record – we need to stop driving so much – no if’s or buts!

I get very agitated by the kind of greenwashed argument that suggests we can carry on exactly as we have been so long as we adopt this, or that, new bit of technology. When I was a child there was just one car in our street – owned by a commercial traveller called George Webb who emigrated to Canada. The only television in our immediate two streets was owned by Terry Winnum’s dad who let us all in to watch the coronation. Back in the day you’d have to fall asleep in the middle of the road for two days to get yourself into a confrontation with a car. Actually we just played there – a whole street full of kids re-running recent history in war games and cowboys and indians in which – because we had been spared any direct knowledge of what had really happened – no-one got hurt. I thought that some men were just born with one leg, and it never occurred to me to wonder why my dad was so prone to getting drunk and having black moods.

Giving up cars in favour of well organised universal and clean public transport would be a huge step in the right direction and it’s not like going back to the so-called dark ages (I’m 74 not 774 years old!) – it’s going forward to a sustainable future and cleaner air almost immediately whilst – if we’re really serious – it might head off floods, droughts, storms, fires and famines further down the line. I don’t hear many people arguing that they’d gladly accept a global catastrophe if it meant they could go on driving their 3 litre SUVs through Bath. Mad Max is only a film after all. Most of the really significant environmental damage has been done in the last 50 or 60 years.

The point is – and I’m desperately sorry (only joking) to disappoint Coco the Prime Minister’s environmental spokesperson – we’ve tried freezing the leftover bread but it didn’t stop the fires in California. In fact we’ve tried just about every trivial, cost free, feelgood and instantly gratifying bit of greenery we could – and nothing has changed. So when the little things don’t work it’s essential that we turn to the big, expensive and culturally challenging things – like engaging with other countries and frightening the readers of the Daily Telegraph – which is all too easy, but anyone who’s still communicating by way of telegraph is going to experience a bit of time delay in the system! Serious change is going to cost serious money – so we might have to abandon plans to tunnel under stonehenge and build half a dozen new airports.

But then, perhaps I should tell you about the first batch of pickled gherkins this season which are excellent. Did I ever mention what wonderful displacement activity gardening is?

Home again, home again, Jiggety Jig.

The herb at the top is French tarragon – a revelatory herb, like chervil.

In the absence of either a market or a fat pig, back on the allotment we swapped the wild plants of West Wales for the domestic sort and took the first really decent harvest of the season. It’s not that we haven’t been harvesting for ages, we’ve had a steady supply of rhubarb and asparagus; radishes and lettuce and so on but today was the first time we harvested a complete five a day meal’s worth – new potatoes, broad (fava) beans, beetroots, garlic and carrots. The carrots were thinnings from a container experiment, and the potatoes too came out of one of the deep containers which have been a tremendous success because we’ve been able to move them around the plot wherever there’s a temporary patch of empty ground. Thanks to our allotment neighbours nothing was lost during the little heatwave while we were away and apart from a hard session of weeding, the plot was looking good.

In the beginning of the season we filled every spare inch with calendula and tagetes and today we had to carry out a radical thinning to give the others room to breathe. There were coriander, angelica, lavender, evening primrose and Nicotiana rapidly being outgrown and so we had to uproot dozens of the more vigorous calendulas to bring the rest on. There’s nothing more unnatural than a natural looking garden! The garlic was just a quick peep to see how they’re fattening up and the rest will be left for a few weeks yet; but the perfume of the single bulb filled the kitchen when we got home.

The few survivors of the overwintered broad beans haven’t done well, having been felled by a fierce and cold east wind – they dehydrated and weakened in spite of our improvised screens. The later sown replacements have grown quickly and well but being far more tender they were more vulnerable to blackfly and the ladybirds haven’t really got up to full speed yet. Perhaps they too were badly affected by the cold and wet conditions. Usually we have dozens overwintering in our window frames at home but this year there were none.

Inside the polytunnel the tomatoes, aubergines, chillies and peppers are all setting fruits and once again the main work was removing side shoots. Even the melons have taken off and we’re waiting for the first three fruits to set before removing all the rest to give the smaller number a chance of filling out and ripening. The Douce Provence peas too were afflicted in the same way but again the spring sown replacements are much better. Of the three varieties we’re growing – Alderman, Douce Provence and Robinson’s Show Perfection; the last of the three is winning hands down although we have to fight the pigeons for them always so this year we’re growing them up the inside of the fruit cage which at least gives us the first five feet of vines. The greatest challenge, growing peas, is giving them time to fatten up, but getting them in before the pea moth strikes. Allotments become hotspots for all sorts of pests, and this year we’ve kept all of the garlic, onions, carrots and parsnips under the finest insect netting. It certainly spoils the appearance of the plot but we’re hoping to grow some leeks free of allium leaf miner this year. Once again we’re trying a variety of pot leek from Robinsons and it’s looking good so far. I guess if you’re going to grow organically the only option is to use insect barrier netting where the pests are tiny and bird netting for everything else. As for slugs and snails it’s clear that healthy plants don’t get attacked nearly so much but this year we’ve resorted to a nematode treatment because weather stressed plants are the go-to slug food. All I would say, though, is that you should ignore the photos on the seed packets. Typically, lettuces have a few yellow leaves on the outside, but you just peel them off – as you do with many other vegetables, put the peelings on the compost heap and suddenly they look just like the ones in the catalogue.

The rest of the day was spent building a sturdy frame with bean sticks to grow cucumbers and a winter squash up. The cucurbits can take up a huge amount of space in a small allotment and growing them vertically makes a lot of space.

And yes we had a wonderful time in St Davids, and did lots of reading, writing talking and walking. This lovely adder came to say hello on the path one day, and we watched a very large seal who looked up intently at us from the safety of the sea below us. The bird highlight was a ring ouzel – only the second I’ve ever seen. We also saw dozens of manx shearwaters skimming across the sea in the evenings as they went out in long skeins to feed. We’ve camped at the other end of the bay, and in a tent it’s easy to hear the haunting sounds they make as they fly back low over the fields to Skomer where they nest. It’s a kind of wheezy whistle that, the first time you hear it, makes your hair stand on end – like the cry of a fox or a vixen on heat – except that particular cry gets dubbed on to every night scene on every thriller shown on television!

There were times when we sat on the steps of the van watching the sun setting on the horizon of glittering sea, when I thought I could stay here all summer – but the allotment too has its moments of joy. If the last couple or three postings have felt a bit too philosophical, I’m sorry. Very selfishly I do my thinking at the laptop and I’m struggling to find a way of drawing all the threads together. Global extinctions, climate emergencies, pandemics and economic crises are, it seems to me, all closely related. Is it our culture that’s diseased and no longer fit for purpose? We’re all getting agitated, angry and paranoid about things and that’s not the mindset that our perilous situation deserves. Can we really save the earth one cabbage at a time? Well, we’ve tried everything else.

Is there a cunning plan?

It’s utterly depressing, but the answer is going to be no. At the present moment living in the UK feels as if we’ve strayed into an episode of Blackadder, except there are no jokes. I’d like to be writing warm, lyrical and encouraging posts about how wonderful life is at the Potwell Inn – except it’s not – and I don’t mean that I’m lying here on the floor with an axe embedded in my head, although the thought may have entered Madame’s mind. The reason it’s not wonderful is that we’ve spent eleven months in a suspended state; very largely on our own and separated in any meaningful sense from our family and friends. During the first lockdown and the first easing we enjoyed the fine weather on the allotment, where we almost lived for months; but now in the winter there’s hardly anything to do there because we used the autumn to prepare for next season. So we’re deprived of the exercise and the sense of engagement that kept us sane for the first five or six months. Hence the renewed interest in long distance walks and the renewed exploration of the Mendip Hills, of which a little more later.

Of course there are always books. Madame reads novels and biographies, and pretty much anything else she can lay her hands on but I’m firmly in the grip of the protestant work ethic and my reading tends to be highly directional and (dare I say) improving stuff with footnotes and references and centred on the green new deal, environment, natural history, food and that kind of thing. I wish I felt more improved than I do but for the most part it leaves me feeling sad, utterly depressed or screaming at the TV in anger at the incapacity of either interviewers or politicians to ask or answer the simplest (but most diligent) question – more Blackadder. I remember once talking to a depressed consultant oncologist who confessed he was so overworked his first thought on meeting a new patient was how am I going to get this person out of the room? I always felt that any culpability for his reaction was far more due to the distant political choices that put him in that terrible position, than to any deficiency in him.

I probably shouldn’t unload any of these personal anxieties except that I know that it can break through the isolation that leaves so many of us wondering if we’re the only ones who feel this way. Isn’t the first aim of gaslighting always to isolate your critics and convince them that it’s all their fault. But it’s not our fault that covid and brexit have been so badly managed. I look down the list of countries in which Potwell Inn readers live and I can see that many of us have been let down – in different ways – but still let down.

Not feeling safe; not knowing what to believe and what not to believe; not understanding what it is we’re meant to do; missing the everyday pleasures of chance encounters with neighbours and friends; missing the lectures and meetings that cement us as a cohort of like-minded individuals; missing the hugs and the smell of our grandchildren’s hair (OK that’s a bit out there, but you know what I mean). All these etch into us like frost and rain etch their way into rock, and leave us feeling empty and exhausted. I read too many articles about the benefits of nature for mental health, but the principal benefit may be to writers writing books about the benefits. I reckon I’m a pretty resilient person, and I know that Madame is too; and yet we both feel hollowed out by this experience, and sometimes the walking and even the cooking and gardening seem more like displacement activity than wholesome activity should. Staying sane seems to be an immense effort of will.

One question has been bothering me in particular because, in the light of the constellation of crises we’re facing, the issue of food security must surely come near the top. Do we really want to get back to normal if that involves the pollution, the destructive farming and the sickness that associates with bad economics, poverty and junk food. So I’ve spent quite a lot of time reading around the question of food security, trying to see if there’s an answer to the question – could the UK be more self sufficient in food without going deeper into the abyss of intensive chemical dependent farming; and the answer – I’m pleased to say – is “Yes – But”.

If there are any vegans and vegetarians out there who think we can save the world by eating processed non-animal gloop, then the answer is no. If there are intensive farmers who think the way forward is more of the same, the answer is no as well. It’s no to industrial organic farms and no if you think we can feed ourselves on mediterranean delights grown on the allotment or purchased in the supermarket. If there are any people sitting in 3 litre SUV’s prepared to embrace anything except changing the way they drive, it’s also no. And it’s no to airlines, and no to food miles and criminal waste. In fact the answer can only be yes if we’re all prepared to change – quite a bit. This isn’t just a personal view, it’s a summary of all the scientific evidence I’ve managed to get my hands on.

Number one – (two three and four as well!) – is we need to eat less meat, much less meat; preferably chicken because it has a much more efficient conversion ratio. We need to embrace a plainer more sustainable diet sourced as locally as possible – to quote Michael Pollan – ‘eat food, not too much, mostly veg‘. The over embracing plan is summarised by Tim Lang in his book “Feeding Britain – our food problems and how to fix them” * – and he describes it as “a great food transformation”. Crucially this isn’t a book about organic farming or vegetarian diet, it’s an important book about farming, diet, public health, social policy, politics and food culture. You would profit from reading it wherever you stand on the food and farming spectrum. Of course, the cynics will say that the population will never embrace such far reaching change, to which he would respond that in a crisis – let’s say the onset of war in 1939, for instance, there won’t be any alternative but to change. The storm clouds that are gathering on the horizon right now are coming our way and our political system is proving itself unfit to deal even with one challenge, let alone three or four existential crises at once.

They would say that wouldn’t they?

Mandy Rice Davies

But this is good news. We are categorically not all doomed – we can make the changes we need to make and what’s more important, we can create a far better, far less divided and infinitely safer world as we do it. We mustn’t allow the powerful to claim that nothing can be done except more of the same. They would say that wouldn’t they?

Well there we are, and just to prove it’s not all been eye strain these past couple of days, the long Mendip Way walk is being chipped off a few miles at a time. On Monday we walked from Tynings Farm down to Shipham; back through Rowberrow Warren and across Blackdown. Why would I bother with these obscure place names when many people who read this will never see them? and the answer is that place names are beautiful in and of themselves, like tiny topographical markers that set up home in your mind and remind you that the earth is made of places which, just like us, have names and histories and are often very beautiful. The walk took us down the most lovely valley, following a stream most of the way, and then back through a forestry plantation and out on to the open moorland of Blackdown. Barely five miles but offering three quite distinct landscapes. Best of all we found hazel catkins flowering in profusion in the sheltered valley. The photograph shows one such catkin, coated in melting ice formed in the overnight frost but demonstrating that spring will come – and it can’t come too soon.

  • I’ll make a proper booklist soon – most of the books have been mentioned but I’ll assemble a proper list in case anyone is interested.