Four consecutive days of wall-to-wall sunshine should have reminded me that the spring equinox – not the boring Met Office one but the proper mobile one – isn’t always on the same day. So we missed it entirely while we worked on the allotment. When I was a schoolboy I was invariably referred to by one teacher as “rod pole or perch” – an ancient system of length measurement which lingered on the back of our exercise books along with acres, chains and gills. Equinox is at least based on an observable measure – the day nearest to offering an equality of time between night and day. Easter, of course does its thing based on a 13 month moon cycle defying all logic and creating great hazard for those who always plant their potatoes on Good Friday. I love it: the sheer irrationality of it all defying the tidiers-up makes me smile.
Anyway we were so busy on the allotment that the equinox passed us by and bang on time I’m driven back to the same old question – why is nature so good for us that it distracts us even from marking the (old) beginning of spring? After the winter we’ve had, I can’t begin to say how lovely it’s been to feel the sun on our backs at last. Coming back home every day with our muscles aching and fingers creaking you might think a bit counterintuitive to make a fuss about it. But the allotment offers one small part of our lives over which we have almost complete agency. In an existence filled with expectations from every quarter; bills; health problems and you name it – the allotment is an oasis in which we get to choose what to do without having to bend to the cold winds of authority. There are rules of course but they’re mostly common sense and neighbourliness. Nobody pays any attention to the daft rules about the permitted colour of sheds and the precise percentage of flowers to veg that must be adhered to, and as any Welsh poet will say; rules are the primrose path to creativity.
Anyway, the business of agency is a key concept for achieving eudaimonia – true, deep, happiness. We spent a lot of time this week planning how to move the compost bins and turn them into raised beds, how to move two water butts from one optimal position to another even optimal-er one. We ordered our seeds, decided our priorities and prepared beds for sowing and planting out in the next few weeks. Each day we felt that little bit stronger and we thanked the weather gods for their generosity as we always must.
Being perpetually hard-up we are free from fantasising about machinery and fencing to keep out badgers and people. Every bit of mulch has to be planned and transported down the bumpy path and, expecting the weather to be unexpected much of the time, we develop a kind of radical patience thanking nature for her unexpectedly generous lessons. The bee at the top for instance is not a bee at all but a fly; a dronefly- in fact a Furry Dronefly. I’m not an entomologist but a handy app on my phone helps me to sound cleverer than I really am. “Shame on you” cry the gathered deacons with their withered knowledge and multiple imagination-sucking certainties. But I’ve got other things, better things to do – like learning Welsh and cooking lovely meals and so I’m content to make an assisted guess now and again.
The passageway and steps leading steeply down from the Paragon to Walcot Street
We were lured out by the sunshine this morning and went for a decent circular walk taking in some shopping, a stop off at Toppings bookshop to book tickets for John Wright’s launch for his new book”Grasslands” in May, and then a bit of wall propping overlooking the weir feeling warm for the first time in months. Then another loop up the greatly diminished Walcot street to the top and back along through the Paragon, Milsom Street and home.
Don’t try this at home (or ever)
Going down the steps to Walcot, if you looked closely across the road,you’d have noticed a rather early flowering Greater Celandine in a large pot outside a charity shop. I took this photo ages ago and didn’t think to photograph today’s specimen until it was too late. The thing is, I’d only today been looking today at an entry in a book on Welsh herbal remedies. The section on Celandine comes from a 15th Century herbal translated from the Welsh by John Pughe in the mid 18th century and taken from the tradition of the Physicians of Myddfai – so going back a bit.
A good eye salve. Take vinegar, white wine, the juice of Celandine, and Plantain. Mix them together in a pan and let them stand there 3 days and 3 nights, take it hence, keep it in a box and anoint thine eye therewith.
Here’s the thing, though. Among many other suggested uses, the bright yellow juice of the Greater Celandine is caustic enough to burn off warts and piles. There’s no way on earth anyone could put such a decoction in their eyes without damaging themselves unless there’s something in the recipe or the procedure that the canny doctors failed to share. I’ve got both glaucoma and cataracts (not that they trouble me much and they’re being well looked after by the NHS) but I’m sure that if Andy the optometrist were to lean across me with a mixture of Greater Celandine juice, vinegar and Plantain, and then try to drop it into my eyes I’d be out of the door pretty fast.
That’s the trouble with the reading that I’m doing about Wales and her history. Someone recently alluded to a kind of Cambrian fog that gathers over the culture of the country and leads unprepared travellers (like me) astray if we fail to inspect the teeth of the Bard to be sure that it’s gold and not mercury amalgam glittering between the lines.
We learned the difference between exegesis and eisegesis at theological college. Exegesis means trying to unpick what the original author was trying to say. Doing it properly can feel like unpacking a bottomless suitcase full of ancient garments and figuring out how they were worn. The opposite term, eisegesis, is much beloved by the evangelicals and involves trying to stuff a pair of your own theological pants into the suitcase after discovering that there’s nothing in there that quite matches your prejudices and so you have to chuck out the original contents and their bizarre notions, so you can get more of your ideas in and declare that you have the true meaning of the original.
There’s a phrase that comes from one of the great 20th century scholars of ancient literature who said – if that was what it meant then to the writer, what should it mean to us today? – which is to say that ancient literature and history need to be read with your brain in gear and not uncritically regurgitated as if it had nothing to do with the culture in which it was created.
The events of history are mundane and slippery; evanescent. It takes a poet to land a grappling hook on them and haul them in. It takes a poet to write about them fruitfully and yet another to read them well in vastly different circumstances and even those readings are as evanescent and slippery as the original events. There is never anything but provisional in the pursuit of history, and yet it’s the cultural air we breathe and so we must take it seriously.
I’ve been reading Jan Morris’ book “The Matter of Wales” and the third chapter deals with religious faith in Wales. I found it quite troubling because as she enumerated the waves of religion from the Celtic through Roman Catholicism, post Reformation Anglicanism (both enforced on the Welsh) and then waves of Calvinism, Methodism, Moravianism leading to the 20th century collapse of faith – I realized that in my own way I’d been touched by all of them and even experienced many of them myself. I went through what’s falsely described as Primitive Methodism in Sunday school (the Prims); conventional low Church of England, fiery atheism, Wesleyan Methodism, Evangelical low churches, Anglo Catholicism and theological college on the cusp of the Charismatic revolution. Whatever the light was at the end of the tunnel, they all seemed to swerve away from it when it got too challenging. Pretty well all of them operated a chaplaincy to the status quo. Nowadays if I was forced to put a label on my beliefs it would fall somewhere in the dim space between Celtic Christianity and Taoism but it would be better to evoke the old spiritual doctrine of reserve and apply it to the world in general and the understanding of past cultures in particular. The light at the end of the tunnel for me is the incredible freedom of feeling I don’t have to defend any orthodoxy at all.
Madame and I were sitting in bed today, reading peacefully – she on her tablet and I was immersed in a book by Jan Morris called “The Matter of Wales” the title being a playful use of language in order to indicate the substance, the deep matter of the country. The book was mentioned in Carwyn Graves book “Tir” which I’ve now finished and recommend without reservation as a gentle pushback against some of the more extreme (destructive) advocates of rewilding. For Carwyn Graves the Welsh landscape embodies the history of Wales for better and for worse. History is written in the soil, the rocks and fields; the livestock, the farmers and their lives but especially in their stories and poetry. It’s a beautiful book, and completely by accident I met one of his interviewees in the pub in Bwlch but we only talked about our experiences as writers for the then local Bristol newspapers. As soon as I saw his name in the book I recognised my lost opportunity to talk to an award winning maker of perry – pear cider.
The two books – Graves and Morris take interestingly different approaches to their subject. The landscape for Carwyn Graves is perfused with recollections of the old ways; a form of living history and its lessons for us in the present day. For Jan Morris the landscape is a living being; writhing, roiling, joyful and melancholy by turns. The history here is inscribed in lives lived in the landscape. She’s a magnificent writer on Wales.
So there we were (I mean Madame and me!) in bed reading and we have rules. Silences are only broken by mutual consent – “can I just play this ?….. ” Today she played an old recording of Pentangle – the brilliant Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny Thompson and Jacqui McShee with others – and in something of a Damascus moment I realized I’d left out music, and in what Flann O’Brien would have called a “Keats and Chapman” moment (without the terrible pun at the end); the whole landscape opened in front of me as if I were stood on a mountain top seeing the plains below receding in aerial perspective until the faint blue landscape reached the sea. Of course, you idiot! I thought -it’s language, history, literature, poetry, art, religion, drama and music. It’s the art of the kitchen table and the blackened pot suspended by its crân dân (fire crane) over a crackling fire, the blacksmith, the spinner and weaver, the shepherd, the singer and the traditional doctor, the understanding of plants, the wood carver and the brewer. One of the most inspiring paragraphs in Carwyn James ‘ book is his explanation of the way that in Welsh the word for culture isn’t the cocked finger, class ridden culture from across the Severn – but it also embodies all of the undertakings of ordinary people to advance the experience of being human. So emboldened by this thought I made some coffee, went into my room and guided by some odd instinct searched out a small book about Welsh folk medicine. I’ve known about the Physicians of Myddfai for many years in a more or less superficial way but I had no idea where Myddfai actually is. I had a strong idea of what I was intending to write but (as ever) no idea of how it would shape up so (also) as ever I hunted for a suitable photograph and came up with one I took of one of the three reservoirs which accompany the A470 across the Bannau Brycheiniog passing Pen y Fan. We stopped in a layby there for a brew-up and were joined by a couple of bikers from Merthyr Tydfil on their way to a campsite near Brecon. It seemed to me at the time that this was a near perfect view, but as I looked for the village of Myddfai on the OS map today, thinking to include the physicians who came from that area, I realised that the village was no more than a couple of valleys to the west of where I took the photo, and furthermore the foundational story/myth of these physicians involved a meeting between a farmer and a beautiful water goddess near a lake just like the one in the photograph.
My question would be – is it even possible to understand a landscape or a word in isolation from its whole culture. Many years ago we travelled by ferry and bus down to a small hamlet in southern Ireland for a holiday with friends. One of the friends owned a holiday cottage down there and knew some of the local people. One night we were introduced to two brothers who lived alone in a fairly squalid cottage just up the lane. The two brothers shared a bottle of Guinness with us and clearly thought we were pretty wealthy on account of one of us wearing a new pair of Docs. I had taken a small tape recorder with me and they told stories and sang songs to us provided we returned the offer with songs of our own. Our companions suffered a sudden attack of elective mutism and I sang a supporters song from Bristol Rovers which seemed to please them no end. Just to give a flavour of their lives, they told us that they had advertised in the Cork Examiner for a wife that they would share between them. The ad also generously noted that a pre-existing child would not be an obstacle! Anyway, it became very clear that their stories and songs of the Famine, and of the IRA battles of the past – not to mention a disastrous storm from some time in the distant past – all existed in their minds as if in the present. They sang and spoke of them as if they were still actually happening. It was a powerful example of what I’ve been thinking about in relation to Wales.
The photograph at the top was taken the day after my retirement ten years ago. I remember the journey because our youngest phoned just after the photo was taken with some kind of crisis and we had to abandon our plans and drive back to Bristol where we were still living. The photo and the memory belong together and can’t be separated.
So here I am ten years on, firmly resolved finally to speak and read Welsh. But the conglomeration of these thoughts has led me to the inevitable conclusion that this project goes much further than learning a bit of grammar and some words. The project is a kind of total immersion into the language; the broad culture, history and all the rest, in order that – finally again – I can see the Welsh plants in their broadest meanings, and I can see Welsh food and poetry, history and song as the Hegarty brothers saw their corner of southern Ireland – as essential to their humanity – daft and cruel as that might have seemed at the time. This is what I mean by using the phrase “learning by immersion” because it’s the absolute prerequisite for deep connection with any place in the world.
I’ve done a bit with the words already and I’m pleased to be able to write and say “good morning dragon” in Welsh, although I doubt if there will be any opportunities to use it, and so I’ve switched over to a different but well-connected course which is filling me equally with terror and hope. I can already say most of “I would like to learn to speak Welsh” without having to take a lie down in the middle. Madame has banned me from doing any practice in her presence. Oh and I’ve bought some – well quite a lot of – books. Learning by immersion, you see.
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.
Another wet day in Cornwall – in Camborne they’ve exceeded the biblical flood by exceeding 40 consecutive days of rain. It hasn’t been a huge problem for us down at the southernmost tip except for the lanes – there’s only one really main road and the rest are pretty much lanes anyway and they are running with water; some right across and others at both edges but all the puddles are sheltering murderous suspension wrecking potholes. If anyone’s got a spare billion pounds we could do with some of it down here.
Anyway, the upshot of the long days confined to our rented cottage on the top of a cliff is that Madame has been doing a lot of internet surfing, and today she typed in my name into Gemini and discovered that I am the landlord of a pub in Helston whose wife was once a police dog-handler but who has sadly died. In fact, according to the infallible AI, several pubs in the neighbourhood are claiming that I am their landlord – which prompted me to ask her whether it would be OK to pop down to the Five Pilchards to see my virtual wife. Madame was not amused. Much as I love Google Gemini, it makes more false connections than a village gossip, and bigamy is still a crime.
Sadly spring has not sprung nearly as much as we’d hoped so neither the plant hunting nor the moth trapping have taken up much of our time and among other things – like writing this blog – we’ve been binge watching the old DVD’s we brought down. John Schlesinger’s “Cold Comfort Farm” is one of the funniest films ever, and Ian McKellen’s sermon to the Quivering Brethren as Amos Starkadder is an act of sheer joy. I’ve even (naughtily) started sermons myself once or twice with the words “ye’re all damned”; not forgetting to grip the edge of the pulpit and stare at the congregation with sheer malevolence for fifteen seconds. But we also watched Alec Guinness’s superb performance as George Smiley in John Le Carré’s Karla trilogy. The two BBC series miss out the middle book. It was a treat, and an acting seminar, to watch Alec Guinness playing such a morally complex character. The very last words that Smiley speaks as Karla is led away, when someone says “George you’ve won” and he replies “I suppose I have” made me wish I could hug him. It was so brilliantly done; the way he managed to express the sadness and loss of winning his epic battle.
All that ambiguity sent me straight back to yesterday’s post with the thought that I’d missed an important aspect of flourishing even though I did say that it’s by no means a primrose path. When, back in the day, I talked to parents about christening, I would often find that they had an odd idea that we believed that babies are born bad and needed to be made good by baptism. Something about washing away sins had taken root in the collective understanding. Frankly I think that’s a horrible idea, but even horrible ideas deserve a bit of thought. I talked yesterday about cultivating virtuous habits – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage; but I didn’t offer any idea of what the starting point might be. The idea that we’re born bad and need to be made good which I described as horrible would be one place (but totally wrong I think). On the other hand I’d find it difficult to say that we’re born perfect at the top of a greasy pole of corruption because that’s equally far fetched and nasty. So what about a working definition of what we might call the human condition which pitches us somewhere near the middle point that Aristotle was so keen for us to maintain. Then we say that we can move up or down the scale by way of good or bad habits.
Each of the four or perhaps fifteen virtues which can, in combination lead us towards flourishing and fulfilment have their counterparts which can lead us in the opposite direction; unhappiness and suffering. As an example I could mention affairs. We’re all much of a muchness in the sexual attraction stakes; many of us have primary commitments but that doesn’t stop us from meeting others that we find attractive. In a very long career of helping people through crises of their own making, one factor comes to the surface almost every time. We rarely get ourselves into trouble in one giant act of folly. We do it step by tiny step and then one day it’s too late. The same goes for any kind of addiction; food, alcohol, drugs, erotic fantasies, fraud, thieving, field botany or hoarding rubbish. Thankfully I’m not a counsellor so you needn’t worry that I’m about to offer advice but I’ll just quote a line from an ee cummings poem –
where’s too far said he
where you are said she
Notice also that I haven’t mentioned any divine punishments or rewards. That’s because I don’t believe in them. None of the purported torments of hell can measure up to the guilt and shame brought upon us by our own perversity, although there are many occasions when I wish that Danté’s circles of hell which included special places for bishops, princes, corrupt politicians and not forgetting people who didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Occasionally I really wish that could be true. But there are always some wicked people who seem to get away with it. On the other hand I’ve sat with some horrible people who – as they lay dying – seemed to be suffering terrible agonies of remorse. Too late!
Conversely I think that the idea we should punish ourselves and live shadow lives in order to achieve the extremely notional rewards of heaven is also wicked. The way we live our lives can’t or shouldn’t be reduced to the spreadsheets and calculus of rulebooks. Is there anything wrong with muddling along and trying very hard to learn from your mistakes?
Looking out to sea in a gale from Kynance Cove café towards Lizard point. Hot chocolate – heaven; rocks – hell.
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.
