Unexpected visitor – a moorhen presumably prospecting the pond!
Apologies if you’ve already read a previous version of this post which I put up in error – a fat thumb exercise – before it was ready to go.
We’ve been running the trailcam every night and it’s true to say that our most frequent passerby has been a very fat rat. A couple of weeks ago we filmed a fox with another corpulent rodent in its mouth so whatever else the rats are on the allotments, they’re well fed. So I just thought I’d post an update on the night shift since Christmas. Number one is obviously rats with at least two adult individuals and one possible young one but it’s difficult to be sure with a fairly low-res image. Number two is – or rather are – a couple of foxes who hunt almost every night. The badger is a much less frequent visitor in spite of the fact that there’s a huge live set at the top of the plots. It seems that they haven’t enjoyed the terrible weather and stayed indoors; but we had a good clip on the 17th Feb where it looked as if he/she was digging a latrine but got spooked by something and scuttled away. There are two regular cat visitors and quite a few field mice. They are all mostly active between 10.00pm and 6.00am but in the summer we often see foxes at dusk. Surprisingly, we often record a robin singing away at 2.00 am. and last night a moorhen passed by – caught by its call – rather drawing attention to itself I thought.
As for daytimes we see squirrels but other mammals are conspicuously absent although we know there are visits from deer who seem to like runner beans . Birds on the other hand are regular visitors. I’ve already mentioned robins, but we see magpies, rooks and jays poking around in the wood chip. Thrushes and blackbirds enjoy searching the wooden edges of the beds for slug eggs. We once heard a goldcrest in a nearby tree and of course the pigeons are ubiquitous. We see buzzards high overhead often being mobbed by the corvids but we don’t often see red kite although we know they’re around.
There are Peregrines nesting barely 1/2 mile away on St John’s church spire, and we’ve watched a sparrowhawk hunting down a pigeon outside the front door of our flat. That’s apart from the mixture of gulls (lesser black backed, herring and black headed) cormorants, herons, kingfishers, long tailed tits near Sainsbury’s, swifts, swallows and house martins then otters, and now beaver(s) in the river. For a city centre area we seem to have some extraordinarily rich wildlife. On Tuesday we went down to the riverside path to take a look at the conservation work and there was a sign on the railings advertising the presence of Daubenton’s bats. We’ve seen and heard bats flying outside in the summer but lacked the kit to find out what species they are. We once had a magical hour watching Daubenton’s flying over Stourhead lake in the summer twilight. Perhaps we’ll try to borrow a bat detector this summer and give them a name. The moth trap battery is charged and ready to go as soon as the weather improves and I’ll carry on recording the plants so with a bit of luck we’ll be carrying out a very slow bio-blitz of the riverside area (which includes the allotments).
Every time we go on to the riverside walk we are passed by sweaty runners and cyclists who race past us missing all of the interesting wildlife. We, on the other hand celebrate the slow and the almost stationary life of the city. Being pretty old is an excellent excuse for us to explore the natural riches of urban life.
These lead mining rakes could go back to Roman times
Yesterday we drove back from Cornwall. It’s just over 200 miles to the most southerly point of the UK and with the help of a great deal of EU money it’s either a motorway or improved dual carriageway almost all the way down to Penzance. Even with the B road connections at both ends of the journey we can still do the trip – which used to be something of an adventure – in not much over four hours. I’m not a great fan of long journeys on motorways. They seem to lack any sense of where you actually are and for all their rapidity you can still sit in a traffic jam for half an hour while a couple of blokes dig out a flooded drain, negating any time saving. Anyway what’s so important about speed? To me, the feeling of boarding a plane in cold and rain and leaving three hours later it in fierce sunshine and blistering heat is a bit deranged. I once helped an old friend to move some beehives on to the heather on Exmoor and as we drove back we got stuck behind a tractor. “Oh good” he said, “I love it when we have to slow down”.
Anyway, as we came into Somerset yesterday the satnav chuntered away about delays on the M5 (there are always delays on the M5) and suggested an alternative route. I’ve never done it before but yesterday I thought – let’s give it a go and see what happens. So we followed the instructions and minutes later we entered the real world after three hours of tooth grinding boredom. The new route took us across the top of the Somerset levels by Brent Knoll which I’d never seen so close before, and onwards, passing a view of Cheddar Gorge which showed it off to perfection and then to the north of Blackdown passing Rickford Rising where the rain that falls on Blackdown emerges after travelling through the limestone rocks. Past the bottom of Burrington Combe, and into the villages of Blagdon, Compton Martin and West Harptree before crossing the reservoir and into Bishop Sutton. If we had any sadness at leaving Cornwall, this was a serendipitous reminder that many of our happiest memories are vested in the Mendip Hills.
I fell in love with the Mendips when I was seventeen and was introduced to caving by being taken down Swildon’s Hole. It was an awesome experience and emerging cold and wet after hours of scrambling through the cave the first breaths of Mendip air were always sweet. Madame never took to it and so my underground adventures were curtailed, but before we got together I would go up to Blackdown with my closest friend Eddie and explore the easy caves with – occasionally – reckless abandon. Our biggest problem was getting someone with an interest in getting cold wet and muddy who also had a car and was prepared to take us. It was rather like the inevitable compromises that aspiring bands have to make in seeking a half-decent bass player. Luckily, Madame liked walking up there and once we’d got an old Morris 1000 pickup she grew to enjoy hunting for plants and fungi; so we’ve thrived on Mendip air for many years.
I love Mendip, I love Cornwall, in fact I love almost anywhere with a complicated and even ancient industrial history that’s been overgrown by time. Although there’s almost no trace of it now, I was born on the edge of the Bristol coalfield. There was an elderly retired miner just up the street and I can remember passing the open cast mine at Harry Stoke when it was still open. Eddie and I used to play around the capped pithead of Parkfield colliery near Pucklechurch and the local hospital was named after Handel Cossham an unusually kindly mine owner, lay preacher and benefactor so, I suppose that laid the foundation for my inner landscape. My interest in plants that can survive in post industrial landscapes was born, like the passion for the old dramways (notice the soft mutation you linguists!) – in childhood. The moment I find one of these places I feel at home – whether here in Bath, or on Mendip or in Cornwall – I know where I am. Perhaps that’s why I love South Wales and its people.
I don’t know if all this explains how the Mendip Hills captured me, but the fascination wasn’t something I picked up late in life; it was there from the earliest days and I only had to stumble into it, almost by accident, to find myself there; to feel integrated (if that makes any sense at all). So here are some photos of the Mendips, of Velvet Bottom (who could resist that name?), Longwood valley, Black rock quarry, of high Mendip and Priddy above Swildon’s Hole across to Blackdown and Crook’s Peak which you’ll recognise as you blast down the M5 south of Bristol. Trust me – the walk up there beats arriving anywhere ten minutes quicker.
We both love this place – any time outside the holidays, when it gets impossibly crowded. After the weather we’ve been having there wasn’t much chance of seeing anyone beyond a few walkers but for once, apart from one brief heavy shower the sun even came out, the café was open and everyone was very happy. There were no more than a dozen or so cars in the car park, and it was blowing a hoolie as we set out, knowing that once we dropped into the valley we’d be a bit sheltered.
As we were packing the rucksack I thought I’d give myself a rest from plant hunting. Neither of us had slept well, in my case because I’d had an unexpected phone call from a very old friend with whom I thought I’d lost touch and heard some unexpected news about three others who’d died recently. I didn’t sleep beyond 3.00am as thoughts of mortality circled around my mind. So we travelled light even though I knew that the likelihood was that we’d find some rare plants, because the Lizard is an absolute hotspot, and true to form we found some lovely plants including two national rarities and two more flowering exceptionally early. Here are the rare ones – I won’t say exactly where they are growing because they could so easily disappear from too much contact with boots. I don’t know if there’s any research on these particular plants, but certainly orchids plus many other species, growing wild, absolutely depend on mycorrhizal relationships with fungi and if they’re dug up by hunters they’ll just die without the extensive fungal network that keeps them alive. That’s quite apart from a potential fine of up to £20,000 pounds because this is a site of national importance. The Lizard is an enormous lump of serpentine rock, which is rich in magnesium and poor in calcium. The soil lacks nitrogen and is very thin in places so without help from the fungi, the plants would starve to death. Anyway here are the rare two – there are others but they haven’t flowered yet so left to right – Cornish Heath and Land Quillwort which is tiny and I’ve been looking for it down here for maybe 4 years!
The best way of finding these plants as always, is to join a natural history society and get someone to show you. The Quillwort is almost identical to several other common plants that also grow in the area and as a relative beginner I’ve spent many hours trying to learn about them. Anyway, it was almost just as much fun to spot a couple of relatively common plants – Three-cornered Garlic and Kidney Vetch in flower rather early. It’s always difficult to blame global heating, but even after the wet winter we’ve suffered, there are a few more early risers each year
There were Dandelions, Daisies, Gorse and Hairy bittercress also in flower. All the other locals are there in leaf, and we spotted Sea Beet, Buck’s-horn Plantain, Sea Plantain, Thrift and Wild Madder amid the heather and plentiful blackthorn. Here are some of them:
So yes it was a lovely walk, and we sat on a bench outside the cafe where, nearly 60 years ago we’d emptied our pockets to see if we had enough money for a shared cucumber sandwich. We spent the first night of our first ever camping trip together that year with our tent pitched up on the headland. It’s a very special place which – just look at the photos – has remained pretty much unspoiled – helped by the long walk from the car park and the steep footpath you have to take.
But as well as the sunshine, the massive waves crashing on the rocks and rebounding with a wild roar; as well as the fine mist of sea spray that fell on us like a veil from the wavetops and rocks; as well as the glimpses of deep green water through the curling white horses; we heard first and then watched two Choughs playing in the wind above the steep sided valley. That and the hot chocolate so sweet it almost burnt our throats helped down with a toasted tea bun. It’s the very essence of being in nature
The weather in Cornwall has been pretty terrible since we’ve been here, but we’ve managed to get out for a walk on most days. So far it’s always culminated in rain, and most of the time it’s been blown in by storm winds. Last night it was so strong I could make out the somewhat orchestral sounds of the timpani as waves crashed into the cliffs and the shingle harbour below us, then there was what Matthew Arnold called “the melancholy soft withdrawing roar” of the waves retreating from the shingle beach; clattering and sharp, more brassy than soft last night, like a chorus of a thousand stonechats – and then the woodwinds battering and flickering around the windows searching for gaps to whistle in. There are times when we miss being in the campervan, but not last night. Yesterday morning we tried to walk across to the Caerthillian valley to do a botanical reconnaissance in preparation for another visit in spring, but we were beaten by the cold wind and retreated to the pub for fish and chips. Then I spent the rest of the day researching how so many rare plants manage to survive the soil round here, with high levels of magnesium (poisonous to most plants) low levels of nitrogen, and low levels of calcium. It turns out that the magic trick is to grow in conjunction with invisible underground fungal networks which have almost magical powers to search out water and convert the dodgy soil into food for the plants while blocking the baddies in return for a share of the plants’ photosynthesized sugars. It was an afternoon well spent I think, leaving me excited that at the very core of nature lies millennia of cooperation. The rarities simply couldn’t exist without each other.
Naturally the Lizard, beautiful though it is, is not the center of the universe and elsewhere, politicians are busily trying to reverse that process of mutuality and convert our once rich culture into serpentine dust. You should treat that last sentence as a metaphor. The current news is as depressing and disturbing as it could possibly be. I’m very used to seeing the degradation of Cornwall through neglect, but that attitude which was so apparent in the past where it was said that at the bottom of any hole you could find a Cornishman, but it was rarely mentioned that at the top there was almost always an Englishman stuffing the money into his pockets. Now the contagion is spreading through the whole country as decades of neglect through profiteering are too obvious to be covered up by corporate or government doublespeak. There’s an ugly mood afoot and it’s growing so quickly that even a quiet stroll down a quiet seaside lane is compromised and diminished by fearful thoughts of the coming storm.
A little list
Montbretia (Crocosmia), Winter Heliotrope, Hart’s Tongue fern, Tree Mallow, Pellitory of the wall, Common Gorse, Foxglove, Sea Beet, Nettle, Black Spleenwort, Alexanders, Sea Radish, Purple Dewplant, Sea Carrot, Hottentot Fig, Bramble, English Stonecrop (17 species)
When we say that the Lizard is one of the most biodiverse places in the country, that little (and very incomplete) list is only the beginning. I’ve seen many of them in the centre of Bath, and the seaside specialists pop up along the whole of the west coast. But this was just a brisk fifteen minute walk in the rain alongside a lovely Cornish hedge. If we had time and a great deal of patience we could find over 900 in just this small area. You can rightly feel as if you’re touching a great beauty here.
How to flourish and live beautiful lives in a hostile world should concern us more than it often does. As nature struggles from extractive farming, chemical desolation , carbon dioxide, global heating and polluted rivers we’re neither winners or beneficiaries of all that bogus productivity. We’re the victims. We need to demand more than lowlife chicanery from our politicians, the so-called tech titans and the client media who feed us poisonous lies. Across the green from us there’s a man who’s probably got severe mental health issues and regularly bellows “The earth is burning“, sometimes for an hour at a time. He’s not wrong.
It cost us a soaking, but we went down to Poltesco this afternoon to see what we could see and came up with these lovely spring flowers. There were more, but the rain defeated us even though it was glittering in sheets and drifts through the sunshine. Last night’s talk at the Village Hall brought back a thousand memories, not least because the speaker was using photographic slides which occasionally found themselves upside down or skipped past by the eager operator. The hall has just been refurbished so – to defeat all the stereotypes – it was warm and comfortable and there was a sound system that worked so well I could hear the speaker. The subject was the Lizard flora, and the speaker talked for 2 hours without any notes. It was a real tour de force that left me making frantic notes in the dark. They turned out to be illegible but I rewrote and researched the gist of it this morning and I’ve the beginnings of an accurate list of plants and locations.
In fact we’re here at quite the wrong time to see many of the local riches. I did a quick database search of a small area of the Lizard and where at home I might expect to find 250 – 300 species, here there are over 900. The result of hearing all that local wisdom and experience is that we now have a very clear idea of where to look and what to look for and we’ve already decided to come back with the campervan in May.
If you look carefully above the familiar Beech hangar known as the Nearly Home Trees, or more properly Cookworthy Knapp you’ll see the glimmer of a wind turbine propeller blade just peeping above the trees. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to allow it to be built there but it does little to enhance a view that always lifts our spirits when we return to Cornwall. In fact it’s not actually in Cornwall at all but still in Devon – providing a useful, if overworked, scapegoat to blame for the indignity. I feel slightly guilty about calling them “Nearly Home” because we don’t live here, but we’ve both loved coming down here for over fifty years since we lived in Falmouth for a year and fell in love with the place.
Since the first time we discovered the Lizard it’s been our go-to destination. We’ve camped here, stayed in cottages when funds permitted and brought the campervan down on many occasions. Writing and drawing have always been a part of the agenda, but photographing and recording some of the amazing plants have been added to the list so we bring a faintly ridiculous amount of kit here, up to and including the portable WiFi gear that weighs far less than the portable Remington typewriter I insisted on stuffing into my rucksack on our first visit. A second and equally eccentric corner of the bag was filled by an Italian aluminium coffee percolator. The last time we stacked our kit up in the hall our neighbour asked us if we were moving out.
Storm Chandra – the latest of three named storms has changed our idea of what’s possible while we’re here. In fact I don’t remember us having a “storm season” at all until quite recently but now it’s a thing, like the monsoon season and the hurricane season. No doubt Keir Starmer will be bending every sinew to discuss the climate crisis with the Chinese government; just after he’s signed off on buying a few more nuclear power stations and secured some juicy weapons contracts. How blessed we are to have such Nelsons at the head of the ship of state, (Sorry; that sentence was auto-corrected from ” such Nellies at the head of the shit of state”).
Anyway, our journey down was largely unaffected by the storm apart from fierce rain as we drove through Devon and a 30 minute delay on the A30 when traffic was funnelled into a single lane so that four blokes could dig out a blocked drain. We were so glad of the new windscreen wiper blades! There were flooded fields to the left and right of us almost all the way, but we managed to load the car in a dry spell and once we got beyond Helston it cleared up beautifully. Chatting to a lost delivery driver this morning he told me that the side roads hereabouts are still blocked by floodwater and fallen trees, and on the television news we learned that the Environment Agency hadn’t even begun to assemble their array of mighty pumps on the Somerset Levels until storm Chandra had made landfall. There was a worrying moment as we drove through Redruth, when we heard an awful noise and smelt something like burning rubber which thankfully turned out to be outside the car and leaking in. It looks and feels like a town where whole industries go to die. They voted against the EU down here but the new A30 improvements are a stark reminder of what a few billion pounds worth of help from the neighbours can do. So now there’s fantastic roads infrastructure for the bailiffs to haul the machinery and the jobs out of the county.
Anyway we’re here and in, and after the usual hour of curses and hand-to-hand combat with the mobile router we even have the internet. It didn’t take long to Google up what’s on locally and we’ve already signed up for a talk at the village hall on Monday about the Lizard Flora. There are two rare plants that we’ve been seeking for years – one of them – Spring Sandwort – also occurs on the Mendips and although we know roughly where they ought to be we’ve never found them. But they also occur down here on the Lizard and the reason is that it’s a plant that’s tolerant of the post-industrial mine waste that occurs from lead mining on Mendip and Serpentine on the Lizard which has large surface areas of the mineral. The other plant we’d love to find is Land Quillwort which, being not much larger than a 1p coin and also not producing flowers but spores is loosely associated with ferns and is one of the plants we have in danger of becoming extinct. The Lizard is the only place it grows. So – as my Mum would have said Hope springs eternal in the hearts of the faithful (actually Alexander Pope said that first but I prefer my Mum’s identical version.
Spring Squill (I think!)
One of the problems of identifying the Quillwort is that it bears a strong resemblance to the emerging leaves of the Spring Squill which also grows here – it’s just much smaller. We were wandering on the clifftop some years ago before we got quite so interested in plants and we met a woman who was scanning the grass as only botanists do. “What are you looking for?” I asked. You probably need to know that this was before I discovered how deaf I’d become. I was sure she’d replied “squirrels” and so not wishing to display my ignorance I asked “what sort? grey or red?” – “Spring”- she answered” and then the penny dropped. I hope you’ll also be pleased to know that just before we came away I got my third set of NHS hearing aids which are absolute game changers. Apart from being able to hold a lucid conversation with Madame (my mishearings were becoming hilarious), I can now receive phone calls, listen to music and even connect them to the satnav. Madame finds this bit troubling because now I shout at thin air and have conversations with people who aren’t there.
While I was waiting to intercept the lost delivery driver at the top of the lane I chatted to a ninety year old local man who was born here and still lives in his grandfather’s house. He looked as fit as a flea, and told me how he still gets pleasure from pushing open the door knowing that his grandfather’s hand had touched the same ironwork. The air must be pretty good around here.
But in answer to a question I was asked during the week– “What was the actual millionth word?” – well you may think it was a bit of a disappointment because it was “much”. Feel free to develop any metaphorical significance you like; it’s Freedom Hall here at the Potwell Inn. The oldest existing version of St Mark’s gospel ends mysteriously with the Greek word “gar” – ‘because‘ and scholars have had a field day inventing possible reasons and even helpfully completing the book to their own tastes. In the case of the Potwell Inn, I like the word ‘much’ as much as any other but I finished the sentence in any case and after a short rest, here we are again.
Last Monday was alleged to be some novelty, named (by the media) “Blue Monday. We were all supposed to be fed-up by the endlessness of winter, the short hours of daylight and our January bank statements. I’m sorry to buck the trend but I had a lovely day which included feeling very pleased with myself for completing last year’s resolutions but also submitting 420 completed botanical records to the Vice County Recorder which, thinking about it, probably spoiled her day. But maybe the crowning moment was finding a Lesser Celandine in flower on one of the two main roads into Bath. Notwithstanding the pouring rain and wind it brought a touch of spring into our hearts. It was in a half-starved looking garden just opposite the derelict hotel where the police were busy removing 700 cannabis plants from an illegal factory. You see, in Bath there’s no need for a writer to make stuff up – it just comes along, barely 50m from where we live. The smell of cannabis was so strong nearby that we called the spot “Skunk Corner” and wondered how the residents managed to survive their habits. It may well turn out that they lived blameless lives, living next door to the extractor fans, which would be a great example of blaming the victim.
The Celandine wasn’t the first exciting plant of the year. That was the Greater Dodder that was found climbing up a riverside nettle on the New Year plant hunt by the same Vice County Recorder whose Monday I may have turned blue. Sorry about that. The Dodder was – if not rare, certainly very unusual which bears out my belief that the place to look for rarities begins as you step out of the door. The VCR, Helena, was kind enough to email back and say that some of my records were interesting. Chatting to our friend Charlie yesterday – he’s South African – he said that was a classic example of British understatement. On the other hand, they might be 90% wrong which is why we all have to hand in our homework for review. We don’t overdo praise here in the UK.
But if you were to ask me to say which find was the most important, then I’d say the Celandine was most important and exciting to me and the Greater Dodder was more important to science, with the rider that whilst Celandines may be ubiquitous, like House Sparrows, Starlings and Turtle Doves once were – if we don’t record them they might begin to disappear too. But the most important reason for my ranking the Celandine highest is that it’s one of the most noticeable markers for Spring. Ever reliable, easy to find and bright in colour so they show themselves in hedgerows, they always gladden the heart. However grey, cold and wet the weather the Celandines will announce the turbo-charged arrival of the new plant hunting season.
We’re off to the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall for a break but the weather outlook is pretty awful. Nonetheless we’ve been checking our plant hunting equipment – hand lenses, GPS unit, charging batteries, testing cameras and SD cards, packing bags and running tests on the new moth trap, choosing books and waterproofs. So we don’t expect too much from the weather and probably the moths will be hard to find but whatever happens we’ll have fun and if the worst comes to the worst I’ll finish reading three big books, two on fungi and a new one on hedgerows. The allotment is tucked up for the winter and the trail cam is busy with visits from fox, badger, squirrel, domestic cat and – of course – rats. We’ve filmed the fox predating rats which was a heartening sight and the soil is taking a well-earned rest, although from reading my fungus books I’m discovering just how busy it is just below the surface.
I’ve also been testing Googl Gemini AI to see if it can help with my work – mostly playing with it and asking difficult questions to see what happens. It’s immensely powerful – it digested ten years of my writing in a minute and came up with a summary that was more right than wrong but still needs a pile of editing. There seems to be an algorithm that favours the more recent over the older stuff and there are one or two WTF? moments including a word I’ve never used and had to look up. I’d like to teach it to do routine and boring jobs on the spreadsheets so that I can get on with the more interesting bits.
We seem to be living in what the Chinese call “interesting times” – with what used to be regarded as responsible politicians behaving like hooligans outside the pub on a summer Friday night. Madame has suggested that we don’t watch TV or read newspapers while we’re away. It’s an attractive proposition. When I was very young my friend Eddy and I used to go occasionally to a night club in Yate. We were almost always refused admission because we were deemed too scruffy. Every Friday the bouncers would clear the club at closing time as soon as the inevitable fight broke out, and if it didn’t they would start it anyway. I tried once to point out to the bouncers that the fights were always started by young men wearing suits and not looking scruffy. Like so many occasions in my life I got into trouble for pointing out the evidence. I was thinking about this last night and I realized that this is a pattern that’s been repeated since I was about twelve. Among my many talents is a capacity to enrage people who dislike being challenged. Ah well, I’m not apologising!
Books mentioned – I recommend them all:
Fungi – Collins New Naturalist series: Brian Spooner and Peter Roberts
The Fifth Kingdom -An introduction to Mycology Brice Kendrick
Hedges – Robert Wolton, Bloomsbury British Wildlife Collection.
Choices, choices. Should I illustrate the beginning of a new era with a sunrise, or the end of an old one with a sunset? And what should the photograph express? Should it be triumphal? a resolution achieved; or should it be a lamentation for the passing of the moment? In the end I opted for a misty sunrise over the river in spate, with the architectural vacuity of the Crest Nicholson development, the Dredge Bridge and a solitary seagull – because every adventure has to begin where you are. In any case I’m only meeting a personal target. Nothing will change and I’ll stagger over the finishing line wondering what all the fuss was about. The stars and planets will not align in any special manner; no flowers will bloom as I walk to the shops. It will be a perfectly ordinary winter day; grey, drizzly and cold enough to wear my favourite Shackleton jumper – scratchy, warm and smelling of the Welsh mountain sheep who gifted their woolly coats for my benefit. This blog, and my life will continue in much the same way as a celebration of the ordinary because ordinary becomes the capitalised “Ordinary” when you see through the distractions.
And what of it? ten years of trying to make sense of a stolen world that’s lost the will to live. Ten years of being governed by the clueless and the sociopathic, the narcissistic, the spineless and their goons – kept in power by the infinitely malleable consciences of Pavlov’s voters who’d kill their mothers for a Greggs sausage roll. I think I’ve explained that enough. I’m off to a quieter place where I can breathe.
Keeping a journal is one thing. Publishing it day by day is another altogether because there’s so little happening. No juicy confessions of sins committed or even intended because my life is straightforwardly dull. Got up; looked at my watch; made tea; ate five biscuits which I dunked; got up again and made coffee; counted out the day’s medications; emptied the dishwasher; went back to bed and read an interesting book on fungi. There’s nothing there to attract the attention because the real interest is always in the interaction between the mundane and the mind. Who was that rough sleeper outside Sainsbury’s? How did he get there? what were the crucial choices in his life that led him to the pavement and a life of begging? How did those two shoplifters teach themselves their routine of violent quarreling to escape investigation by the two police who stopped them and then backed away? Does this charity shop smell of old clothes? Is the man in that couple over there being attentive or controlling? Why is my plate cold?
The romance of life is always there but sometimes you have to look for it. The unusual plant growing in a crack in the pavement isn’t going to shout out to you; you just have to be interested enough to look. The otter swimming in the river, the little shoal of Dace glittering in the shallows, the Fumitory on the allotment that – aside from being an invasive pest – is just different enough to warrant further investigation.
When our first child was just old enough we would walk up Granby Hill in Clifton which still had its cobbled gutters and it could take an eternity because he was so fascinated by the discarded litter trapped in the cracks between the setts. Cigarette buts, silver foil, broken glass, bits of shiny metal and twigs all seemed to bewitch him. He would slowly walk on, head down, savouring each and every object as if it were a treasure waiting to be discovered. I was always happy when he was engaged in this way. It’s a fundamental human act to weave stories, myths and legends around the ordinary and everyday.
I’ve been around a long time, and worked in many places that were rich with stories. I suppose that’s where I learned how to value them. People, it turned out, rarely wear their experiences on their sleeves, but with a bit of prompting and some patience, the most unpromising lives can suddenly blaze, flame out like a reignited log on a fire. The Severn Pilot who would walk the banks of the river on his days off in order to memorise the shifting of the safe passages who was walking one day in thick fog when a small tanker heading for Sharpness came slowly past and a voice called out “Is that you, Peter?” The cider maker known by everyone as “Doughnut” whose name was bestowed on his first day at primary school when he wore a white shirt with a red band around it and whose drinking had put him into a hostel and who grew a lovely garden there and told me some of the unexpected tricks of his trade. The nickname persisted as long as the community that attached it. Another old man who told me how they hid barrels of cider from the Customs and Excise under the hedges to avoid exceeding their permitted limit. The oldest man I’d ever buried; 103 years old who moved in with his son who was in his 70’s when he was 90 and told him that the garden was a disgrace and then dug it from end to end. The electrical engineer who had saved a fellow worker’s life with his first aid training and told me it was one of the most powerful experiences of his life. You could easily pass any one of them on the street and not notice them, but give them some time and you’ll discover for yourself the power of the Ordinary.
I’ve never forgotten a visit to an old man to arrange his wife’s funeral. Back in the day he’d been an old Redcliffe boy and played rugby for the Old Reds. He was in a wheelchair with both legs amputated. As we chatted he asked if I’d like to see a photograph of his wife. Of course I said yes – I’m always a sucker for a photograph – and he pulled out a photo that had been taken on his honeymoon which only amounted to a single night in a Weymouth hotel. They were both standing on the promenade, he in his casuals; white open necked shirt and pressed trousers that, true to the fashions of the day, looked loose and baggy but you could see he was something of a catch. She – standing next to him – was just so stunningly beautiful I’ve never forgotten her. A faded and rather crumpled black and white photo came to me in a blaze of light and I learned something about the fragility of life and the way that love blesses everything it comes into contact with.
So yes, the Ordinary is anything but ordinary and – as the saying goes – for a hero the harbour is the place you set out from, although it’s good to get back to it when the sea’s rough and the wind is blowing a gale. I’ve had ten years of retirement and ten years of typing away at this blog and it’s been the most tremendous fun; learning entirely new skills, taking up field botany and doing some serious photography. I’m still struggling to get my head around an intellectually satisfying account of how the concepts green and spirituality could be linked into some way of fending off our collective descent into a hell of our own making and I fully intend to keep going with this blog and my love affair with the Ordinary as long as I can. Madame and I are very happy living in our virtual pub, even if outsiders might see it as a small flat in a concrete building. I knew this moment would be lacking in drama but there we are. I’ve just completed one million and thirteen words about the Potwell Inn.
While Madame was pruning she was joined by a pair of robins
Yesterday we finished all the pruning except for a couple of dangerously barbed gooseberries which demand thicker gloves than we had with us. It’s the tenth anniversary year of the first allotment – the one where Madame is standing, on the day we were offered it; 14th April 2016. I think she’s looking a bit dubious. It seemed as if it had a long history of abandonment – each successive tenant adding a new player of plastic sheet, carpet, children’s’ toys and even a bicycle dumped in the wooden compost bin behind her. There was a random and unidentifiable tree and some raspberry canes but other than that it was Couch grass, Cocksfoot and Bindweed all the way.
We decided that the only way to get on top of it was to beast it and so, where we could get at the surface layers of plastic we pulled them out. The carpet was harder – not that it deterred the weeds – and so we strimmed the whole plot, burnt it off with several passes of our big flame gun and then double dug it. None of these, of course, were the kind of methods we were hoping to use, but kindness and no- dig organic treatments don’t bother the kind of weed infestation we were dealing with. Neither, by the way, does glyphosate which (apart from being carcinogenic), barely gives the weeds a headache. The raspberries were old and clapped out and so after a couple of seasons we replaced them. The exact spot where Madame was standing is where we now have the fruit garden in the top photo whose blackcurrants we pruned yesterday. The soil wasn’t bad at all, but inclined to ball up in wet weather – it’s alluvial clay loam – and since we moved on to the plot we’ve added what must be tons of compost and manure. The battle with the weeds never ends, of course, because the more we feed the soil the more they like it. We try to keep on top of the weeds in the fruit garden by feeding, mulching with fleece which we get from our friends smallholding in the Bannau Brycheiniog and then covering the whole lot with wood chip. The fleece disappears in a year, shared with nesting birds who especially like it for lining nests, and the wood chip also rots down surprisingly fast. This creates a loose covering mulch of about six inches above the mineral soil layer from which we can pull out the bindweed by hand. It’s terribly invasive but it’s also lazy enough to take the easy route. True to our original plan the whole plot has been organic and largely no-dig for the last ten years.
The second plot came to us a year later and that one was a world of pain from the outset. Apart from the previous tenant who was evicted for not maintaining it and made regular nocturnal visits to steal and vandalize by way of revenge; there were no less than three layers of nylon carpet in successive strata. You can see from the photo just how useless carpet is as a long term weed control method. The weeds simply grow through it, consolidating its rot-proof woven base with roots. If you look closely at couch grass roots, you’ll notice that they end in a spear which can pass through the smallest holes – including those in a thick weed control mat. We used the same strim / firestorm plus double digging technique and in time it yielded to our determination. The two plots are next door to one another and together amount to about the same area as an old-school “ten rod” allotment plot of about 250 square metres – enough to feed a family of four.
Allotments are the perfect antidote to the next-day delivery culture which saturates our online culture. The very fastest of crops take six weeks from sowing in perfect conditions; an asparagus bed takes at least three years and an orchard ten years except for Damsons which can take up to fifteen to reach full productivity. In the past ten years our plots have reached some kind of maturity. They look and feel like grown-up plots now they’ve adjusted to the way we use them. There’s always a choice to be made between artificially rushing crops and letting them take their time. In the end I suspect it’s as good for us – developing our patience and resilience – as it is for the crops which need time to give their fullest flavours.
Jam tomorrow promises are traditionally used by politicians as a smokescreen for the fact that they’ve neither the means or the will to fulfill them. The phrase was first used by Lewis Carroll in Alice through the Looking Glass. Pie in the sky might be a similar kind of promise. But jam tomorrow really means something in the Potwell Inn allotment, because the work that we did yesterday will bear fruit and hopefully some blackcurrant jam in the late summer. Pruning encourages a bigger crop by opening out the bush to light and air and by removing the old, non-fruiting stems, to keep the size of the bush under control. On Friday I discovered a cache of blackcurrant jam in a cardboard box which – had it been outside in a shower of rain – would definitely have had a rainbow leading to it.
We bought this book in the 1960’s and have used it ever since.
We’ve got ten trees on our plot – apples, pears, plums, and damsons; plus blackcurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants, tayberries, blackberries and strawberries. All of them need various different types of pruning and in the case of the strawberries, of propagation. Of course they’ll grow, however neglected they are but they won’t thrive. Since they all bear fruit in a short summer season we spent almost equal amounts of time bottling, pickling, freezing, jamming, drying and making cordials. You might wonder if it isn’t all a massive waste of time when Sainsbury’s are a five minute walk away – and unless you grow your own you’ll never know just how wonderfully rich the taste of freshly picked vegetables can be. We’re not wealthy but we live like kings!
If you knew how many times a Cox apple needed to be sprayed in a season to make it supermarket perfect, you’d probably never eat another, unless you picked it yourself from an organic orchard. We don’t grow them because of their need for sprays. But we can grow lovely apples that are bred for disease resistance, just as we grow tomatoes and potatoes that are bred for blight resistance.
The food industry has a stranglehold on almost all western politics and the introduction of novel ingredients to the food we eat may be reflected in the growth of diseases that reflect it. But it’s not new. My friend Howard – a Brooklyn New Yorker, remembers his childhood when bottled milk smelt of formaldehyde. Food adulteration at a criminal level has always been present; flour being particularly vulnerable to additions like ground chalk . Wherever there’s a profit to be made, there will be an unprincipled supplier who’s willing to exploit it. If you want to eat safely, growing an allotment or a garden is one simple way of ensuring that at least some of your diet is unadulterated. Sometimes the boldness is astounding.
I’ve been reading a marvellous book on fungi by Brian Spooner and Peter Roberts in the Collins New Naturalist Library series. It’s an absolutely comprehensive introduction to all things fungal, from athletes’ foot to fly agarics and includes an eye opening section on “food,folklore and traditional use” which reads:
Cudbear was a commercial enterprise started in 1758 in Edinburgh by one George Gordon, who originally called his new dye ‘cuthbert’ after his mother’s maiden name. The manufactory moved to Glasgow where up to 250 tons of Ochrolechia tartarea [a lichen found in Scotland] were processed annually, originally collected from the Highlands and islands, but later imported from Scandinavia, the Canary Islands, and Malta. The ammonia used in processing the dye was distilled from Glaswegian urine, of which no less than 2000-3000 gallons were required each day. The Glasgow manufactory closed in 1852, much to the dismay of Lindsay (1856) who hoped that a ‘revival and extension of this traffic would probably prove a great boon to that remnant of the Celtic race, which is fast disappearing from our shores’. Cudbear continued to be manufactured in small quantities in England up to the 1950s, most of it exported to the USA for use as a purple food colouring and for dyeing leather.
I think that when it comes to importing chlorinated chicken from the US, we’ll have got our revenge in first. “Another slice of Scottish purple iced piss cake, Bishop?”
Nature, as we understand it as gardeners, is far from natural but our massive intervention – even as organic gardeners – can be constructive or, as in the case of intensive farming, extremely damaging to the environment, and here I have a bit of a disagreement with some environmentalists about the way in which we present the dangers. I’m an amateur field botanist; that’s to say I go out with Madame on long walks – looking for plants and recording them. Occasionally we find something quite rare and that’s both rewarding and exciting. On one occasion we even found one of them growing on the allotment. It’s a tragedy when even one plant goes extinct, but it’s only a true tragedy for the handful of people who even know what it is. As CP Scott, nephew of the first editor of the Manchester Guardian would say to his journalists of a dud story – “it cracks no pots in Warrington” Interestingly – possibly only to me – he was born in Bath. If we want to convince people of the price we’ll pay for climate breakdown, we’re going to have to crack a few more pots – and not just in Warrington. The so-called green revolution offered to feed the poorer nations by selling them tractors, agrochemicals and (now patented) seeds – and it caused far more harm than good. Our own cheap food revolution is wreaking havoc with public health. Starvation, migration, flooding, extreme weather, the rise in diabetes and cancers – these are all pot cracking issues in Warrington whereas the extinction of a small population of plants halfway up a mountain is a symptom and not the core of the issue. The earth is showing symptoms of sickness and one of those symptoms is species extinction. What we have to do is to move the scientific symptom into the political debate and our government is showing no signs of moving beyond hand wringing to the kind of changes we need to achieve. The honest answer to people who worry about the cost of environmental change is that it’s going to be painful and expensive and we’re going to have to give up some things we’ve grown to depend on. But the alternative of continuing in the way we’ve been going is catastrophic. This critical debate, one way or another, is going to crack a lot of pots in Warrington and across the western world. The majority of us have little or no experience of growing our own food but we have everything to gain by learning.
You’ve no idea how lovely it is to feel well again; to wake up in the morning full of ideas; relishing each day and going out on our walks once more; a bit further each time. I still don’t know with any certainty what was wrong with me but in the end – and by default because they’d looked at every other possibility – I think it all boiled down to iron deficiency anaemia caused by polyps in my colon which were removed by a lovely team at the RUH and then, after a troubled start on iron tablets which initially made me sicker than ever, they were changed for another type and apart from the bother of waking myself up to take them at 5.00am, I feel better than I’ve felt for around 18 months. Hooray for the NHS and the Royal United Hospital ….. and for our GP who started the ball rolling on what must have been a hunch.
So last year didn’t go too well on the travel front – rescued twice by the AA and ignominiously towed home on a trailer; the engine blew up once, cambelt, water pump, clutch and alternator needed replacing and two trips were cancelled before they even began. But that was then and this is now and the van, Madame and me are ready for (amost) anything but especially for a trip to the Lizard which was just ravaged by storm Goretti and lost both water, electricity and internet for a couple of days. We’re staying in a rented clifftop cottage and the photos at the top were all taken through the half-door; the one on the bottom left taken early on the morning of our last departure. Every time we leave it feels like a small bereavement – there’s a bit of my soul living there permanently.
Having spent several years on the neighbourhood plants – Lizard is a botanical hotspot – I’ve just finished fixing up a moth trap. It’s very early in the year and we don’t expect more than a handful of visitors, but in many ways a slow start is the best way for beginners like us. The more projects we embark on, the more the planning resembles a military campaign – laptops, mobile wiFi router and aerial, books, maps, food; cameras, lenses, tripods, kitchen sink. You get the picture. I’ve even bought a new, clonking great monograph on hedgerows to keep me happy if it rains non-stop, and that’s happened on several previous trips.
Eskdale 2019
Taking photographs is only a fraction of the battle, though. Identifying the plant in question is three quarters of the fun. For instance the little darling below was – so far as I was concerned – a white form of death cap that we found on the edge of a wood in Cumbria a few years ago. It’s been labelled and sitting in the photos folder for years until yesterday when I was reading a brilliant monograph on fungi in the New Naturalist series – when I discovered that it also looked very like another fungus known as Destroying Angel which really is white. In the intervening years I’ve learned how to access the massive power of databases and so I checked on the largest I could find and discovered that neither of the fungi is even recorded close to the place we found it, but that even so my initial identification was more likely to be correct. There is a test to distinguish them but of course the subject of the photo is long gone and so it will always remain an unanswerable question.
That’s the thing about nature, it seems far more malleable than we would wish. It would be fairer to say that short of a full DNA profile almost all our identifications are provisional. Like weather forecasts ID’s are correct on the basis of percentages. 100% certainty is rarer than we’d like. Of course that merely means that we should be more modest about our certainties. A couple of days ago we were on a plant hunt and I overheard someone airily identifying a Feverfew with a lot more conviction than I would dare to offer. In fact, the more I learn about fungi the less likely I am ever to forage for them. Both the Death Cap and the Destroying Angel are regularly and fatally confused with edible fungi. No thanks, then, I’ll have the fish fingers!
So, the packing lists are all made and the kit is all checked over, charged up and wrapped. You would think we were off up the Amazon but you need to remember that as a list addict, planning is almost as much fun as getting there. It doesn’t always work of course, we once drove up to Pembrokeshire for a camping holiday only to discover I’d left all the tent poles behind. On another occasion I forgot the air mattresses, and after a trip to the local supermarket we bought a couple of air beds that were so thick and luxurious our noses were almost touching the flysheet.
But at this moment I can hardly contain my excitement at the prospect of waking up to the sound of the sea and walking between fields and hedgerows which – being much further south – are just beginning to wake up. Bring it on! – we say.
