Did I mention that we love going to the Bannau Brycheiniog – the Brecon Beacons – or, according to the spellchecker here on my laptop, the “banana strychnine”. Every year as the clocks go back and it gets dark so painfully early, we try to squeeze in one last camper-van trip before we drain the water tank and pull the curtains. Summer is never long enough. It’s over now to fungi and ferns and we managed to fit in a walk around the woods on the Mendips last week which was disappointingly light on fungi but challenging on the fern front. I remember well the early days when I thought there were just Dandelions until I discovered that they were just a small part of a huge group. These discoveries always leave me equally exhilarated and depressed. On our walk, and with a good deal of hands and knees stuff, I confirmed what I already knew in my heart of hearts – that not all green and ferny looking things are called Bracken (any more than all overweight white middle class men in Rohan trousers are called Dave). At once, exhilarated and depressed, I lashed out on a couple (more) ferny books and settled down for a good read. I am abashed; vanquished; and breathlessly looking forward to a ferny bash in the Bannau.
So it’s been a bit of a week – two exhibitions; Paula Rego and Goya at the Holburne Museum and Rinko Kawauchi: “At the edge of the everyday world” at the Arnolfini in Bristol; an excellent talk by the Director of the Holburne at BRLSI and two films – “The Outrun” in Bath and “A sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” – both of them lovely; the second, showing at the Watershed was a biopic of Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham a shamefully neglected modernist artist. After the usual depressing few autumn weeks we felt like students again, bathing in fountains of glittering inspiration. Of course the payback came with exhaustion and an urgent call to the doctor when my heart rate went down to 45 and blood pressure to 92/61. I’d have to have been a saint not to laugh when the doctor told me that my symptoms were caused by the drugs I was prescribed to cure the symptoms! I don’t want to expire in a Kafkaesque cycle of thwarted goodwill.
Anyway, the sun’s shining and we’ve booked a spot alongside the Monmouth and Brecon canal. I’ve also been sorting through hundreds of old flower photos but I’m held up by the absence of replies to emails requesting bits of information. If this army of citizen scientists is ever going to live up to its immense promise, the learned institutions need to get over themselves and answer emails from those of us without PhD’s. But then I’m a bit of a loner and the least clubbable person you could imagine. Madame is the only person who comes (dangerously) close to “getting” me – we even hold hands in bed: dangerous!
Finally, I’ve yielded to temptation and bought a black iron bread tin. I’ve had enough of pancake sourdough loaves. Tigger and Eeyore the two starters are going well, and so I’ll re-unite them during the week and start some experiments to create an organic sourdough loaf that stands up enough to make a sandwich with a soft enough crust not to rip the roof of my mouth or snap teeth off. Then when that’s done I’m going to write a long letter to Keir Starmer to explain that his job is not to shuffle bits of spreadsheet around like a junior manager in a shoe shop, but to reunite managerial competence with a bit of visionary leadership and some ethical backbone which he seems to have lost somewhere along the way.
