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.
Imagine a world with no calendars and no clocks; how would you cope with the passage of time? When to sow seeds? when to harvest? When to prepare for the long period without much fresh food? when to eat up stored food before it spoils. Of course the answer must be that you’d still have the sun whose day length waxes and wanes just like the moon does. The moon offers a different account of the seasons of great significance to sailors and fishermen but both mark the year. A solar calendar and a lunar calendar. The deep sky at night offers another cycle through the alignments of the stars. These are all natural calendars which align more or less with the seasons. The ancestors thought it important enough to build an observatory at Stonehenge.
Because those weasel words ‘more or less‘ highlight the difficulty that our imagined ancestors faced. When exactly do the days begin to shorten and when do they start to lengthen again? This, along with ‘when is high summer?’ and ‘when midwinter?’ is a matter of exquisite importance to the farmer and horticulturalist. However we’re not the same as those ancestors because we have atomic clocks and science and we live in the tailwind of the Christian centuries here in the UK. In addition we largely have very little to do with the growing and harvesting seasons. So we have a kind of rich sedimentary history of our relationship with time and the seasons are still as important to us emotionally as they were when we were tending the land and sailing the seas. Seasons without markers, without celebrations would leave a large part of our culture inaccessible.
Many centuries ago when St Augustine of Canterbury arrived here from Rome, he discovered a largely pagan society. The Romans brought Christianity to England and when they left they left a vacuum into which paganism flowed back. Augustine wrote an anguished letter to the Pope recounting the apparently pagan natives worshipping in non Christian temples. The Pope wrote back and said take them back and rename the pagan festivals with Christian saints’ names. I imagine the people didn’t care very much whose badge was over the door and the pagan festival was never truly lost. Christmas overlaid midwinter, and the Nine Lessons and Carols was always good for seeing the village unite, and so on. Easter was a bit of a problem because it was attached to an old lunar calendar festival called oestre (work that one out!). So we now have the residues of ancient paganism overlaid by Roman Christianity, overlaid by a newer Germanic form of paganism, overlaid once again with monastic Christianity, then the Catholic hegemony overlaid by Protestant Christianity and finally by modern agnosticism and scientific rationalism. The key point is that all of these continue to function actively (if unnoticed) within our minds.
Let’s be clear, I intensely dislike the term “paganism” because its negative and critical connotations attack a way of life which has never gone away. But when I used the word ‘sedimentary‘ I meant that these historical cultural layers never really go away; they still resonate and still awaken memories which are closer in time to us than we often know. Hands up anyone who went to a wassail in the last few weeks!
All of which is to remember a festival which is the process of being revived. True to form, in Ireland it’s a festival dedicated to St Brigid but it goes back much further. How, we ask, do we know that winter is ebbing and spring flowing. When we view the question through the series of sedimentary orthodoxies we see that it has various dates in modern times – Winter Solstice represents the shortest days, but when do we begin to notice days getting longer. Christmas is far too soon after solstice to see the days really lengthening. By the Spring solstice around March 21st it’s obvious and if you’re a farmer you might have missed the boat. But the pagan feast of Imbolc is enjoying something of a revival because even in the grip of winter storms, we can all see the days lengthening. We’ve turned the corner – and it’s today.
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.
On the 18th March 2017 at 12.30 pm standing beside the river Wye beneath the road bridge from Hay I watched the water flooding past and realized that it had gone again. It wasn’t a great shock. It had been no greater than a ghostly presence from not long before I retired. It was sudden but completely undramatic. “Oh well” I thought, as I turned away from the river, “That’s it then”. I’d had plenty of previous experiences of sudden changes in my ways of understanding the world and where I belonged in it but it took a while to describe it in anything like useful ways.
Imagine a snake, or a dragonfly larva. Snakes shed their skins as they grow out of them and they begin to wear out. Larvae of all kinds go through a period of shape shifting and as pupae go through various distinctive stages known as instars before the final stage in which a butterfly, or moth or dragonfly emerges, mates and begins the cycle once more. Much as we might wish that nature stood still, it’s always changing. Seasons pass, crops grow and are harvested, young animals are born and pass through widely different life-cycles before they die. The soil; the earth isn’t an inert growing medium it’s teeming with unimaginably numerous interdependent life forms. From the window of our flat we see a small park, trees and the passing river. It’s never still for a moment. However we describe nature it’s hard to use descriptions like peace and tranquility with any honesty. Nature is not a static thing at all; things grow and change and – if we’ve any kind of living faith in anything; any attachment that you might loosely call spirituality – we have to learn to allow for growth and the occasionally major changes that come with it. Some people call losing their faith a tragedy I don’t agree. You have to lose the old, worn-out ideas and attachments in order to grow. Love cannot exist without the certainty of loss.
So I want to describe what I think are two key factors in thinking about these big changes in belief. Firstly, the image of skin shedding in snakes and the shapeshifting of instars isn’t just a fanciful metaphor. These natural life-forms (as we are too) have no alternative, and neither have we if you think about it. Human beliefs also have life expectancy. Religious belief is especially prone to calcification. There’s a gradual descent, for instance from sacrament to ritual, and from ritual to tradition then finally from tradition to habit. Rudolph Otto used the term “numinous” to describe the mysterious and overwhelming sense that floods our minds seemingly directly and not mediated by the senses or the intellect. One word that’s often used to describe such an experience is sacramental. Ordinary everyday things seem to glow with meaning even as they remain entirely themselves. But as these sacramental experiences calcify they lose their fascination and power to move us and become worthless as agents in the next key factor which is the change in perspective that comes at the same time. These powerful experiences don’t fiddle about with the natural world so it becomes more colourful or beautiful; what changes is the way in which we perceive it.
So why do we fight so hard to turn these religious or spiritual moments into stone? Why on earth would we want to freeze revelations until they become unintelligible, meaningless to anyone else. Traditions are the barnacles that police the boundaries of sacred space.
I sometimes seem to receive messages; dreams and waking dreams. I wouldn’t say that these sudden insights are frequent visitors and I’ve always thought of them as being perfectly natural – not hallucinations but just the deep parts of my mind making creative connections and expressing them as poetic ideas. For me, by the time I retired, the sacramental seemed to have turned into ritual where getting it right had become more important than entering the mystery. I frequently tag these pieces with the phrase “green spirituality”, which I’m afraid raises more questions than it settles. Most of the pieces are grasping at possible meanings for it and which I’ve yet to find myself. I’m not coming to this as an expert in any sense. What I’m certain of is that the West in particular is suffering from some kind of spiritual crisis which is eating away at our humanity. I’m just trying to find a way through the rubble, and one possible first step follows:
In the episode of Rick Stein’s Australia that aired on BBC Two on January 6, 2026, Rick Stein spoke with two Aboriginal women in Sydney who shared their knowledge of native food ingredients.They were part of the the Gadigal peopleof the Eora Nation. But what knocked me over wasn’t a recipe or anything like that. It was the way they described themselves as being part of the earth. Doesn’t that perfectly describe our western estrangement from the earth. We know there’s something wrong, and we create libraries of books and films on the beauty and healing power of nature but the problem isn’t solved by sitting under a tree, reading a book or watching a video, because we should be working on mending that broken relationship.
But in spite of any misgivings we’re constantly bombarded with the idea that nature has healing powers. Go for a walk they say, and feel the power of nature. Perhaps nature’s a bit shy when it comes to sceptics like me, but in the hundreds if not thousands of miles I’ve walked fields and tracks both here in the UK and in Europe I’ve yet to experience that power unless I was actively engaging with nature at the same time; listening to and identifying birds; watching and recording wildlife – especially plants. Reading about them, studying them especially the ones in the middle of Bath and outside our front door. Like everybody else I’m excited when I read about aboriginal and first nation people and their connectedness with the earth, but First Nation peoples have a far more intimate relationship with nature than we do. It goes so much further than providing food and shelter. It includes an intimate knowledge of plant locations, special properties and healing potential. When a First Nation person goes for a solitary walk, friends and acquaintances in the plant and animal kingdoms crowd in on them. They even talk to them -which sounds odd until I think that we talk to our plants on the allotment, ask them how they’re doing? is there anything they need? and they respond – more water; more light; get rid of those bugs but leave the others. I don’t believe in the supernatural and I don’t use those voices to claim an unchallengeable religious advantage, it’s just a feature of the unconscious mind in some sort of resonance with whatever you call it – let’s provisionally say the Tao.
I do believe that underlying Nature, of which we’re a part, is some kind of rule bearing substratum. Doesn’t it strike you as absolutely miraculous that behind the mind blowing diversity of nature there lies a silent orderliness that can only be intuited and – it seems – and never fully described. “Whereof we cannot speak , thereof we must remain silent” said Wittgenstein. “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao” – said Lao Tzu It’s that fundamental orderliness without which science would not be possible and neither would the tools of the artist, the musician and the poet. We’re all – in Dylan Thomas’s words –“dumb to tell the crooked rose. My youth is driven by the same wintry fever”.
So, to try to be a bit practical for once; how can anyone move on from just liking a walk in the woods to developing that intimate relationship with nature which is the true source of healing and fulfilment. Well I’m sure there are thousands of suggestions out there offering suffering and discomfort in abundance, not to mention subscriptions. Ten years ago I leaned on the sea wall rails in St Ives at New Year and realized that I had no idea what kind of gull I was looking at. I made a stupid resolution that I wouldn’t pass anything, ever again, that I couldn’t name. I think that lasted just about long enough for me to cross the road and buy a bird book. But out of acorns, great oaks grow, and I changed the way I observed nature, started to photograph plants, bought books when I could afford them and began keeping rudimentary records. I bought a pocket lens and discovered that the closer I looked the more fascinating things became. There was no conflict between science, creativity and nature, because the more I understood the more beautiful nature became.
For the first couple of years I started to keep a secret journal; one which no-one else would ever see. But then, changing technology killed the software I was using and so I started this blog; tracking the long journey into the new. If anyone else can make use of it as a guide or a map then I’ll be pleased. You might well spot me one day on my hands and knees in the mud. I might be meditating or I might be examining a flower in great detail. I’m not sure I can tell the difference!
When you’re as old as me, you’ll probably find yourself saying “many years ago; when ….” – rather too often, since that’s the point when you realize that your children no longer care about, let alone believe your stories. But I’m not going to be caught out that way. I’ll merely say …….
I was on a silent retreat in a Franciscan convent in Dorset and since I was the only man present I was sequestered alone in a cottage on the edges of the estate. Meals were conducted in silence apart from the first five minutes of the one o’clock news on the BBC controlled rigidly by the Superior. Conversation was not allowed and so you had to learn some kind of sign language to get hold of the salt. The silence was only broken once – this was in the period of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest pomp – when it was announced that she’d shut down a couple more coal mines and a steelworks. One of the younger sisters was unable to contain a long snort of hatred and derision. We shared a conspiratorial smile among ourselves and went on with lunch – knowing that if we didn’t eat it all, it would come back meal after meal until it grew whiskers. I remember an old friend, a retired orthopaedic surgeon saying on his 90th birthday that the trouble with thriftiness was that you never got to eat a decent apple. The table rituals were both arcane and hilarious. We were each given a coloured napkin ring and told to sit at whichever place we found it on. What we weren’t told was that no one could leave the table until the final napkin was rolled and replaced in its ring. Needless to say I was the first victim of the rule, but I got my revenge by making everyone wait for each subsequent meal by sitting there beaming until I got bored. It was there that I discovered that I’m absolute rubbish at silence. I much preferred the Benedictines where they were still silent but you got a glass of wine with lunch and one of the monks read aloud from an interesting book.
Anyway the Franciscans were devotedly high church Anglicans and one of the curiosities was their attachment to martyrs, not least King Charles 1st it seems. By and large they were a radical bunch who really did walk the walk, but I was caught out by a jam jar on the table at breakfast time which was plainly labelled “King Charles the Martyr”. God knows (I thought religiously) what’s in there and I wish it would be marmalade but the thought that it might actually contain some sort of relic held me back. A single hair or fingernail would have made me feel very ill. And in any case was it entirely correct to celebrate the memory of the slaughtered king by eating him? Was this sacramental food in some arcane sense? or was it a witty joke by a rebellious sister? and if not – what?
Madame and I really like marmalade, but ever since the invention of Hartley’s “New Jam” – which was as watered down as “New Labour” turned out to be and then sold in smaller jars to add insult to injury, shop bought marmalade- in fact most shop bought jam too has lost most of its fruitiness because it’s lost most of its fruit. If you want the real thing you have to make it yourself. The Potwell Inn has one small problem in that I prefer my marmalade chunky and Madame likes it thin cut with as little peel as possible. This results in half finished jars having all their juices spooned out leaving dense faggots of orange flavoured brushwood at the bottom. I bear it bravely but it gives me terrible hiccoughs. I will get to the point ASAP.
So my family always made marmalade and home made jams, preserves and pickles have always been part of my life. My mum strayed from the path of righteousness at some point in the past and started to use the tinned, pre-shredded and cooked to be sold in giant tins. It didn’t feel right and we’ve never yielded t0 the temptation. If we’ve done the numbers right, we have marmalade all year round but sometimes we run out and then the wait for early January when the Seville oranges come in is a festival of longing. This year and true to tradition they arrived on January 2nd. It was only this week that I finally joined the dots regarding King Charles the Martyr. His execution took place on December 30th and so it’s just possible that the Sevilles arrived a bit early the year of my retreat and that Sister Angela, or whichever one was cooking that week, commemorated the religious festival on a jar of marmalade. It made me think of the Benedictine aphorism that “to work is to pray and to pray is to work”
But marmalade making is equally a thanksgiving festival for me; along with Christmas puddings and Christmas cakes. It’s impossible not to think of my mum and my gran as I’m chopping and simmering, boiling and bottling. It’s a ceremony that requires faith in the future; that we’ll be there to enjoy all fifteen jars in the course of this new year. It’s our opportunity to prepare and eat the best of food rather than the blandest and cheapest industry can manage. It’s hard work slicing the peel of 4 Kg of oranges and I have to keep sharpening the knife. My hands and wrists ache from the effort but it gives a long space of time to meditate and savour the grace of the ingredients and their journey to our kitchen where they fill the flat with their lovely fragrance. The whole act of making marmalade collapses time, prompting an escape from all the anxieties of the present moment, and it’s free; no books (the recipe is so simple) no gurus, churches or self-help groups; and if praying for King Charles 1st is your bag – that’s fine too; it wouldn’t be mine but feel free if its yours.
The Sisters and the Covent are long gone, scattered across the country and perhaps absorbed into other groups but I remember them with great fondness. The Franciscan movement has something to say to us, even now. They could be trailblazers in the search for a new and all embracing spirituality of the natural world – it’s there in the foundational writings of St Francis from the beginning. Every religious movement has to learn to live with its Jabez Bunting and its Brother Elias. The women did better with Hildegard of Bingen and Sister Clare, but there’s always a battle between the bureaucratic and the visionary when the founder dies and the battle for succession begins.
As for the Potwell Inn we opt for the quiet life and do our best to preserve it.
I like to think of Dabberlocks and Furbelow as invisible friends; but in reality, as solicitors for my superego for my whole life, they’ve hinted, adjudicated and occasionally forbidden my wilder flights of fancy. Occasionally they’ll issue a non-disclosure order on one of my ideas but mainly they just sit in silence and I know what’s required. I call it censorship but they refer to it as discretion and normally they win.
The visitations come in occasional dreams and their names and faces are never visible to me but I always know they mean business even if their language is completely opaque and I struggle to understand what they’re driving at. Once I had a dream about a very large and menacing dog clutching a beautiful ruby in its teeth which I think I was supposed to remove. on Saturday night I had another dream in which the words were said – “you can’t argue with a blackthorn” in the context of winter flowering plants. It usually takes a lot of imagination to turn the key in the lock but this one immediately brought to mind a long abandoned project about a character I’d invented called Barnacle. I wrote a kind of CV down for him at the time, along with a quite detailed description of his appearance. Beard, huge greatcoat with deep pockets and that kind of thing. But as soon as I recalled the word “blackthorn” I knew that he would have carried a blackthorn stick representing both the peaceful rambler and the belligerent cudgel known in Ireland as a shillelagh. Two of his multiple temperaments in a single wintry stick that flowered like snow in the hedges in the worst and coldest season of the year.
Then I had him. I’d kept him secret for twenty years and it was time to let him out.
I learned something unforgettable from Sister Enid many years ago, and it helped me to weave some random threads into a thick cloth.The first time I met her was on a Catholic retreat. This was no pious weekend, though, because the La Retraite house in Bristol was, a beacon of radical and practical faith. I took part in a number of retreats there – they were pioneers in bringing Myers Briggs to the UK – but on that particular occasion there was something else going on. The point here is not so much what went on, but the fact that until 48 hours in, Sister Enid didn’t speak a word. She sat in the corner silently and, being young and arrogant, I assumed that she was an ancient, probably half senile sister who had been propped up in the room for a bit of company. We were a strange mix, but amongst the retreatants were a group of sisters from another house who were experiencing – let’s say – interpersonal difficulties. There was something bad eating away at them.
Anyway, the retreat went on and we talked a bit; shared a bit and did some challenging exercises in small groups and in full sessions. In the last plenary, Sister Enid finally spoke. She had watched and listened from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon – the daft old lady in the corner – and then finally and without notes, she accomplished the most forensic examination of a group’s dynamics I’ve ever witnessed. I learned two important things that weekend. Firstly, never again to stereotype and then dismiss another human being because they were old; and secondly that watching, listening and paying minute attention is infinitely more humane and useful to a writer than spouting smartass ideas and showing off.
I even invented – conceived – a character who embodied that lesson. The name, I’m afraid, was invented long before the children’s TV programme called the Octonauts so I must ask that you banish any thoughts of the character of the bear in the TV films. My Captain Barnacle – without the final ‘s’ – is a darker character and – to be honest – he’s part of an alter ego that I created for myself twenty years ago. Here’s the CV I wrote for him – or perhaps it was me all along.:
A wintry story at Christmas
At the edge of the River Severn in the month of December you might stand in the freezing cold one night, with the moon sitting low in the sky and the wind rattling down over your shoulder from the Northeast, driving the clouds across the sky like sea foam. And if you stand until your fingers turn white and brittle and wait and wait as the tide flows and foxes go about their business, you might wonder at the sheer size of the sky above your head. And you might, as you scan the sky, think to yourself – “this is the point in the film where the geese fly over, honking, and my blood freezes” – you might also begin to see the millions of stars above your head and among them you might notice the constellation of Orion with his sword and his belt. And you might also think to yourself that this dark sky reminds you a bit of your Dad’s huge black overcoat then you wouldn’t be far out.
And imagine if you could search in his deep black pockets for sweets, and breathe in the familiar sharp smell of his armpits, and the smell of the bus, and the smell of the rain and the pub and you would feel very safe indeed perhaps and you would know that asking whether such a being as Captain Barnacle exists is a silly question. When you have seen the stars that line his greatcoat stretched over your head in the dead of night, then you just know it, and the teachers, pharisees, inquisitors and pedants as usual, know nothing.
As to the facts, there’s not a lot to be said. He’s a weaver of meanings, like an angel or possibly the weaver of a unique form of cloth. Some people have argued that there may be a hierarchy of Barnacles and such a thing may be as true as any other thing. What I know for a fact is that he lives on a hill near a seaside town – hence the name and rank – and he drives a yellow Morris 1000 van with stars and a crescent moon hand painted on the side, and he has a more or less scandalous and very intermittent liaison with “Astral” who is an “International Clairvoyante” and whose visions regularly transcend the parish boundary.
It’s said he spends the day at a huge loom in a wooden shack, and where he weaves a sky cloth from fragments he has harvested during his journeys. Anything from a ship’s manifest to a small advertisement could be woven. A tiny piece of conversation blown in the wind is not too small to escape his attention. He might be arrested by the arching of an eyebrow or the faint flush of the skin in a chance meeting between two people who do not yet know that they are lovers. A dog’s bark, a small joke or even a road sign might inflame him. A particular favourite of his are lists and catalogues which can easily be unravelled and used again. Memories, sounds and smells are the warp and weft of the cloth and if he can lay his hands on the glint of the sea he can weave it in judiciously so as to bring the whole fabric to perfection. The cloth which he weaves descends only at night which is why you can’t see it in the day time.
The promiscuity of his means is a source of continual irritation to the town, and especially to the deacons of the local church who, being both strict and particular as well as Baptist, have only the one story which is completely threadbare.
This last factor may be the origin of their assertion that “Captain Barnacle is a creature of the night” – a phrase that has a peculiar resonance for parish councillors and deacons. However it may be that the simple fact that he is, in reality, out and about more obviously during the night, is enough to remove the inverted commas and turn the criticism into an observation.
Some refining of the idea might help. Captain Barnacle is especially a creature of the warm summer night. On such a night, the sea-town is held in the air by the force of dreams of faded seawashed driftwood spars; frames; orange-peel;
Delabole slate; terracotta tiles; Paynes grey skies, windworn rocks; sea worn pebbles; scrubbed sand; lichens; quoits and dracaenas as various as silks in a cabinet or an artists’ colour chart. Then, as the sun sets and the pasty shops clean down their shelves, the soft warmth of night insinuates its seductive aromas around the harbour. When the scent of hot tarmac, wallflowers, fish and chips, cigarette smoke and stale beer hang in the salt air like pheromones to the young men and women gathered like moths beneath coloured lights . When Pasties, suntan oil and peeling shutters shriven by the summer heat gift their perfumes to the sky as it turns from pale blue to indigo. When the people refuse the cadence of night and day and they try to stretch the day as if they could hold the tide at the rim of the horizon by sheer effort of will. Then Captain Barnacle will leave home and drive down the winding road through the town.
Captain Barnacle is also a creature of the winter night, of the harvest night, of the night of mourning. He is both Captain of the Feast and solitary figure at the graveside. “Amen to that!” he cries, and the deacons and the parish councillors murmur damp threats and plan horrible revenge. They will whip him with scorpions, they say, and Elder Bell keeps a whole nest of them behind the shop where he keeps the flick knives and condoms for the local lads.
Truth to tell, I think Captain Barnacle is a bit frightening. The smell of his armpits and the acrid greatcoat speak of other adventures and happenings that aren’t so good. In fact they’re everything the deacons say. Sometimes he puts his hands deep down into his greatcoat pockets and you can hear things scurrying around in there.
Some say that the Captain is exceedingly old, even as old as Adam himself and others maintain that he drifted into town in the nineteen sixties and never left. He might be some kind of extraordinary deity or he might be a beach-bum entrepreneur.
The beard is a nice thought. Nothing goes with a greatcoat like a beard, and a pipe. But this beard is different; so dense you could not hack your way through it with the sharpest billhook. A beard to occlude the sky and the clouds. A beard full of thorns and small nesting birds and fugitives hiding from justice. A beard full of things you tried to say and couldn’t. A grey beard with a golden stain that might come from poems spoken out loud or from roll-ups. It is impossible to imagine him without one and so I will give him one without fear of being accused of not really knowing him at all – and the length of his hair? Flowing, naturally, and long …. somewhat wavy and a tad greasy for some tastes.
And his stick? Why of course it’s a blackthorn shillelagh. Dark with age and cured for a year in a dung heap wrapped in oiled cloth to make it harder and more resilient and made by a man called Rex who’d scoured the hedges near the riverside for exactly the right conjunction of root (for handle) and shaft; donned his thickest gloves against the thorns and sawn it off – unique and precious; polished it to a glow and weighted it with lead so that it balanced at exactly one third of the way down where – if needs be – Captain Barnacle would hold it in order to administer stern correction if the deacons came after him on the heath, in the dark.
I guess this is a kind of Solstice card – although it’s been a gloomy, cold and wet day; the kind you’re happiest to see the back of. I woke up at 4.00am with a dream in which the only thing I remember is someone or something saying “you can’t argue with a blackthorn”. I have no idea what that was about except that it’s impossible to force your way through a thicket of them because they’re so horribly spiny. Equally the fruits are completely unapproachable unless steeped in sugar and gin. The other notable thing about the blackthorn is the folk name “blackthorn winter” which according to Geoffrey Grigson in “The Englishman’s Flora” (other genders are available), expresses an ancient association of plants with seasons. The links are more often to do with the medicinal properties or with the supernatural which often overlap. Mistletoe is listed in the same book with countless properties including aphrodisiac and as a “heal all” from the time of the earliest herbals, but Grigson takes a very dim view of the druidic movement as it freely invented folklore, irrevocably clouding the real history.
Actually a Lenten rose
There are others of course – outside the flat today we had winter jasmine, cyclamen and even a few hardy geraniums on the window ledge. Grigson’s pick included the Christmas Rose and of course holly and ivy, traditionally brought indoors in winter to protect the woodlands for spring. I haven’t got a picture of a Christmas rose, which is the white flowered variety but in the same family the Lenten rose was in flower on the allotments today and is a member of the buttercup family; traditionally grown next to the front door to ward off evil spirits.
The solstice manages to condense astronomy, folklore and pagan religion in a single moment of time which, today, was 15.03 so apologies for the late arrival of this greeting. Let’s hunker down now until the blackthorn appears.
We walk into the supermarket or log on to Amazon and it’s all there; the cornucopia, the works – everything the contented human being could possibly want. Except in times of scarcity, after snow or flood or during an epidemic when the shelves are empty and then we’re angry.
Yesterday we had a light frost. We walked down the steep slope to the allotment and the sun – we are almost at the winter solstice – transits behind a row of trees low in the sky – was unable to warm the soil on any of our plot. The overnight temperature according to the trailcam was 2C.
Our culture directs our instincts to want to take control. We have come to believe that each of us – apart from losers who don’t count – is some kind of tabula rasa on which we are free to inscribe whatever we want; fulfillment, creativity, success; even new and more attractive silicone lips. If you can be bothered you can easily test my hypothesis by counting how many times the word control crops up in an evening’s TV ads. Without adequate control, we are all smelly, leaky and horribly unattractive, betrayed by our unforgivable lack of the Big C which is always available – at a price – from a retailer near you.
The sad truth of course is that by the time you’ve been programmed to aspire harder and show the world who you really are it’s too late. You’ve already lost who you really are to the expensively curated simulacrum who gloats back at you in the mirror and demands more, more, and yet more.
If allotmenteering is even remotely therapeutic, as is universally claimed but rarely actually tested; it’s closer to psychoanalytic psychotherapy than that it is to happy days in the sunshine. We are not blank canvases and neither is the earth. Just as we have no retrospective agency with our appearance or with our childhood and past history, neither has the earth. The question we have to take to each session is – “why am I as I am?” “Why do I need to take control all the time?” and for any allotmenteer, and I know this may sound ridiculous, “why do I have such a complicated relationship with this patch of earth?” Why do weeds upset me so much? Why do I have this boundless fear of rats but not – let’s say – hedgehogs? Why did I feel I had to destroy anything that occupied my [?] allotment when I moved on to it. Why am I so obsessively protective of its boundaries? Why do I want so much to kill pests. What is it about badgers that I like most of the time, until they eat my sweetcorn?
If you look at the photograph at the top of this post, you may recognise one of the the tracks up the Blackdown ridge on Mendip. If by some mischance you were to inherit this lovely patch of earth you could decide to grow almost anything. You could decide but you wouldn’t succeed because this land has history; millions of years of it. Once upon a time it was at the bottom of the sea but now it’s at the top of a range of hills. The point where I stood when I took the photograph is above a deep layer of carboniferous limestone, and likely way under your feet there are still undiscovered cave systems. Rod’s pot, Read’s cavern are entered just beyond and below the horizon. Walk on half a mile and (unless you know your plants) you’d never know that you are standing on a cap of acidic sandstone. What will grow on one substrate won’t grow on the other so none of your controlling instincts will prevail. You’ll just have to go with the soil.
Our allotment is on the kind of soil called “clay loam” – we easily checked that with open source maps. This soil – when it’s in its natural state – will bind together in a ball due to its clay content. It’s naturally quite fertile but it can be hard to work when it’s dried out and you shouldn’t trample all over it when it’s wet. This immediately suggests working the allotment in beds, sufficiently narrow to reach from both sides. We also built deep paths filled with wood chip to drain away surplus water. We even tested the soil for pH – it was somewhere near the middle between acid and alkaline. Vegetables have strong preferences regarding soil types and where they prefer to grow. It sounds complicated but the point is that you can’t raze it flat and then flip through the seed catalogues hoping to grow anything you fancy. You have to negotiate if you don’t want to fail. We’re in a frost pocket at the bottom of a steep slope; that’s a problem. On the other hand we’re sheltered from the prevailing South-westerly winds by a row of trees. The plots at the top get a lot more sunshine but their sheds regularly blow down. We have to carry everything down a narrow path to our plot, but we’re pretty well out of sight from the main track which makes it so much easier for compost deliveries and thieves. Control is a fantasy when it comes to growing on an allotment. We can’t order the weather, put up notices to forbid allium leaf miner or asparagus beetle, or plan surpluses of apples which might, like this season, bless us and in others fail to appear or suffer from codling moth.
What goes on invisibly and under the surface of the soil is almost miraculous. Some thuggish plants will even resort to subterranean poisoning to get their own way while tiny nematodes and the smallest slugs can chomp away at the roots of your vegetables: …. “And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum!” 95% of plants apparently have fungal relationships; none of these are visible to us, but their invisibility can’t make them invulnerable to the onslaught of chemicals we use to assert our control over pests and diseases, and I saw in the newspaper today that climate change and global heating are dramatically increasing the spread of pests and diseases, not to mention extreme weather events; storms and heatwaves. Fungicides and pesticides with artificial fertilisers have wrought havoc with the soil structure and depth. The earth is not a blank canvas and we can’t do as we please to it without compromising our own existence.
I recall a couple of farming proverbs that we’d do well to pay attention to:
Live as if you’re going to die tomorrow, farm as if you’re going to live forever
The farmer’s boot is the best fertilizer
If allotmenteering is therapeutic at all it’s in the way that it teaches us a kind of humility – the root of the word refers to humus the condition of the earth, the soil. Don’t try to control; accept, even embrace failure and success as two sides of the same coin. The urge to subdue, to dominate and to control isn’t new, it goes back to the creation myths of the Old Testament as does the subjugation of Eve to Adam. We reject the second of those myths and we should equally turn away from the first.
Have you ever noticed that gardeners are often really nice people? Is it the therapy of crumbling the earth between your fingers, watching a robin feed on grubs you’ve just exposed and watching the clouds for rain ? or is it perhaps the botox injections? Hmm – that’s a tough one!
Warning. This post includes a discussion of grooming and abuse
We binge-watched a whole four part thriller last night on TV. It was my fault. I fancied something like an Agatha Christie without the drawing room scene and just for fun I used Google Gemini to search for something suitable. There followed a typical AI dialogue where I refined my choice on the basis of a few questions and finally I settled on “near the sea” “cosy whodunnit” “wet weather allowed” and one series dropped into the the slot. It was “The Long Call”, based on an Ann Cleeves novel, set in Devon near the sea (I suspected Braunton Burrows but I couldn’t be sure), complete with rain – oh and one last detail that grabbed my attention – set around a religious community.
And off it went with some great actors and even accurate Devon accents. There was a body on the beach and it all looked very promising until we were introduced to the religious community which was very strict, inward looking and eerily familiar to me. It quickly became clear that everyone was lying and that there was enough passive aggression going on to freeze a small lake. My position as a viewer was so completely compromised that I even imagined myself sitting in one of the chairs in the midst of a Brethren style prayer meeting, listening to the endlessly repetitive petitions of a charismatic leader. I’d been there, worn the T shirt and carried the same alienated feelings as the investigating detective who’d been shunned (that’s a technical term with huge menace) by that same community after he came out as gay when a teenager. It was tremendously well researched in the way that vulnerable people were love bombed and befriended, groomed; then became the victims of passive aggression until they were demoralised, subdued and controlled. The next step, because this pattern isn’t confined to religious groups, is violence, abuse and in the worst case murder.
I was pre-teen, pre-puberty, but nonetheless awash with guilt at sins I didn’t think I’d ever committed – and didn’t have the vaguest idea how to commit – and that I could be certain that I was destined, or predestined for hell. Unconditional love, forgiveness and diversity were as underused in the congregation as a Bishop’s bible, although we all knew that bishops were a bad thing and the torments of hell were always good for a spittle infused, red-lipped sermon. Years later I found an antique copy of the hymn book they used which was so full of sado masochistic imagery it would probably be banned today. If I learned anything at Sunday School it was that I was a wrong un and no-one would answer the question “why?” because that was the sin of disobedience.
I left Sunday School as soon as I was able to defy my parents and took nothing away with me except that diffuse sense of guilt into the future. I caught a glimpse of a better looking god in the local anglican church, but that was more to do with fancying a girl in the choir. I got confirmed, took communion once and never went back. Around that time I was groomed by a much older teenager and introduced to a number of dodgy men but fortunately he was arrested before anything too terrible happened. After that I joined a Wesleyan methodist youth club whose saintly leaders kept me safe. We had a fancy dress party once and Mrs Round said “I suppose you’ll be coming as the devil, Dave” . Finally I discovered the meaning of fornication (Oh happy day!/ what happened there?) and after getting chucked out of school over a provocative samizdat magazine which I wrote, published and distributed I met Madame at a CND meeting and we fell unfashionably but hopelessly in love. I was 18 and she was 15. On reflection I was unbelievably lucky to get off the escalator when I did although that didn’t stop the police, and much later the church authorities from treating me as a risk, mainly to their reputation as worthy chaplains to the status quo.
I was about 12 years old when they interviewed me with the utmost hostility at the police station. My Dad was there, but sat silently throughout and when they let me go he never subsequently mentioned the way they had shamed me. Much later on I was a member of a support group for clergy which was supposed to be completely confidential; a safe space led by two skilled therapists. I finally managed to describe what had happened to me then, and also the occasion when I’d unexpectedly encountered one of the paedophiles I had been introduced to during a visit to his mother. This was very upsetting. Even decades later I recognised him instantly. One of the members of the group took it upon themselves to report what I’d said to the church authorities without even warning me. As a result I was telephoned by a church appointed social worker who quizzed me on what seemed to be the prior assumption that the abused were likely to become abusers themselves. In reality both the police and the church authorities became the abusers, forcing me to recall the events without offering a shred of support afterwards. Any trust in the group disappeared and I was on my own again. Completely innocent and yet groomed to blame myself.
As a consequence of all this inside experience of religious communities and controlling behaviour, a large part of my time has been devoted to patching people up; many of them had been horribly abused and robbed of all self-respect. Many of them drifted right back into abusive relationships, but I think I may have made a difference to a few. After the film last night I went to bed feeling thoroughly churned up.
What is it about religion that makes it so dangerous? so corrosive to young minds? I suspect that living without certainties is hard going so shortcutting from judgements of virtue to the ‘either/or’ rules of us and them is an easy way out of difficult thoughts. Madame and I were down in Southern Ireland once, during the Troubles, and we were in a remote bar way south when a group of IRA supporters came in. It was a terrifying hour whilst we sat and they sang anti British songs, us not daring to speak or get another drink for fear of being recognised by our accents. The next day I went back to apologise to the owner for causing a lot of stress and she said it was no problem. I replied “well, we are English” and she said “No but you’re tourists“. I’m still working that one out.
But there is the real reason for the danger of religion. It’s not theology, it’s the binary culture it generates – with its inside/outside, lost/saved, stranger/friend, infidel and faithful. In a world full of anger and hatred it’s all too easy to fall into camps which become gangs – each with its own flags and banners and then guns and bombs.
This morning we were having a cup of tea with our friend Charlie who managed to combine both creativity and science into his life. We were having a conversation about slime moulds – yes you read that right – and we agreed that the earth is so prodigiously beautiful whether you’re looking at an ocean, a mountain or a microscopic cell; and when we consider the almost infinite adaptations and evolutionary steps involved in getting to where we are – then there really is no need to suppose that some kind of kindly, interfering or even malevolent being, could add anything to the picture. By all means use an obvious metaphor, like Mother Nature for instance but I remember saying to someone once about a girlfriend known by everyone as “Peach” – that her name didn’t imply that she lived in a fruit bowl. The sea of faith seemed to be retreating for me. Much later I discovered that the tide comes in twice a day.
The melancholy soft, withdrawing roar– not, in this instance on Dover beach.
Today we were supposed to be in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons in old money), but sadly the weather had other ideas. Storm Bram managed to virtually shut down the road and rail links between England and Wales. The Prince of Wales bridge was reduced to one lane each way because the lamp posts were discovered to be liable to collapse on to the carriageway, and the M48 bridge was just closed, along with some of the railway services. There were two hour traffic jams in both directions so, having packed ready to go we unpacked again, hoping we can set out early tomorrow. I hesitate to bang on about climate change, but really our long neglected infrastructure is in such a bad way that even normal weather, let alone the extremes we now expect are enough to shut us down.
So rather than a report from Wales, here are some videos from the allotment, taken on the trailcam. The opener is, of course, the rat. Rats are everywhere, they carry diseases and love to live in poorly made compost bins. Given a choice of anything to eat on an allotment they invariably seem to prefer our crops, and we’ve watched a rat clinging to a swaying sweetcorn cob and chewing away at our lunch. Badgers also like sweetcorn in the same way that bears like honey, but badgers have other virtues and it’s relatively easy to keep them away from the maize. But rats seem to have few virtues and although tidiness is an overrated virtue on allotments it’s certainly the case that we need to pick up fallen fruit and any other rubbish that would attract them. Sadly, a poorly made compost heap – especially if kitchen waste and cooked food are added to it – and if access is easy (and rats are great at digging tunnels) they’re going to move in and breed as rats like to do. Of the night time videos from the trailcam, rats outnumber all the other animals we see.
We also entertain a couple of cats who, we assume patrol at night in search of prey like small mammals. It would be a brave cat, though, that would tackle some of the clonking great rats we’ve filmed. Foxes and badgers are in a different league. Firstly they are (foxes) fast and (badgers) powerful and they both eat rats. Judging by the size of one of our badgers, they eat a lot of rats!
We like to do our bit to control the rat population and we use heavy duty spring traps baited with peanut butter. The traps are in strong boxes and although they’re not attracting many visitors the badgers just love peanuts and so they will worry the boxes to try to get at the bait, and shake them until you hear them spring. We don’t use poison because there’s always a danger of secondary poisoning to other carrion eaters. Mostly the badgers eat slugs and worms but they’re such lovely creatures we let them take friends and foes – (just not sweetcorn). As I look through dozens of videos I also notice that the rats make themselves scarce whenever there’s a fox or a badger in the vicinity so they also have a deterrent effect.
Foxes too eat rats, and if they mark their territory – which we can easily smell for ourselves – this acts as a deterrent as well. We’ve seen foxes with mange in the past but fortunately our local ones seem fine and healthy. Here’s a magnificent shot of a dog fox prowling one of the rat runs. Isn’t he beautiful? especially right at the end of the video when he pokes his head out behind the tayberry.
So there’s always a lot going on at night on the allotment – in fact it’s quite busy. Yes, of course, we get visited by two legged rats as well and like many of our neighbouring allotmenteers we get things stolen, but as long as we take home any power tools and fix double locks on the shed, greenhouse and polytunnel, then we’re mostly troubled by casual vandalism which is upsetting and annoying but – like collapsing bridges and floods – has its history and causes and won’t be ended by sloganising politicians. Don’t build prisons, build youth clubs! We’d love to teach some apprentice allotmenteers the basics!
Other than that we’re almost ready for winter. Yesterday we mixed a couple of barrow loads of topsoil and compost, filled some leftover feed buckets and planted strawberry runners to give us an early polytunnel crop. I love strawberries and they’re expensive in the shops, so it’s a joy to grow them for ourselves. Growing at least some of our own food gives us so much pleasure, but it’s good to bear in mind that good gardening involves a four way conversation between the crop, the soil, the weather and the pests. There’s no room for a control freak on the allotment. We have to accept – as an astrologer once told me of the stars – that these four dispose but can’t compel. The biggest and best lessons in gardening are as likely to come from failure as from success. I love the fact that the night watch is busy while we rest. Sometimes we turn up in the morning to find the wood chip paths turned over, sometimes obviously by badgers with their strong claws but often by thrushes and blackbirds who delight in eating pests so that we don’t have to persecute them.
Our greatest regret is that we have never – in ten years – seen a hedgehog. They really should be there and I’m afraid that badgers are a major predator, so perhaps that’s just an unwanted outcome of the eternal balancing act of nature. But now the weather will improve and the bridges will open and early tomorrow we’ll drive up to the Bannau to meet our friends for a shared birthday and maybe find some new plants or fungi to photograph. The season is nearly over now but there’s always something to capture our interest. And finally – badger versus rat trap – keep looking on the left hand side of the frame and listen out for the trap springing. The trap didn’t get the badger (as if!) and the badger didn’t get the peanut butter. Nil nil draw, then.
