Tag: green spirituality

Meet the other part of the iceberg.

Honey fungus mycelium on a tree stump. It’s called a rhizomorph because of its shape – like a rhizome.

Sometimes it seems – although I don’t believe a word of it really – sometimes the stars get themselves into a truly malignant alignment and the boils, frogs, flies and rain just keep coming without remission. This last year, what with the campervan constantly breaking down, the extreme weather and an onslaught of health problems has been an all-round shitter! Add to that the election of a malignant government whose big idea is to preserve everything that was wrong about the past 50 years and crush the best in order just to stay in power and ….. ? well, you decide.

I’ve written before about the challenge of accepting good news amidst a sea of effluent but this last few of weeks, having got rid of the polyps in my bowel which were causing iron deficiency anaemia; last week I finally got an appointment to fit my new hearing aids after waiting 8 months, and another appointment to sign off on the laser peripheral iridotomy so I can get some new glasses. Oh joy! and to cap it all I feel better – which is a non scientific way of saying that it’s marvellous to be able to wheelbarrow full loads of wood chip down to the allotment without having to keep stopping to catch my breath. I can see the end of the tunnel although it’s just a small disc of light at the moment. The campervan is fixed, we have a list of adventures planned for 2026, the allotment is all but ready for next season and –

  • – having met my targets for plant species and records, I’ve now turned to processing my fungus photos – and this is going to be an altogether harder task because until a couple of years ago I had no idea what, apart from field mushrooms and fly agarics, what most of them are called. Yes it’s true; I am a proper propellerhead. Anyway I thought I’d start with this image because the fungi – OK toadstools – we see are only a very small part of the actual fungus. Most of it comprises minute underground threads, collectively called mycelium, that can extend for many feet and occasionally miles around the part we see in the autumn. As instanced by the Honey fungus at the top of this piece, Honey fungus species actually weave their minute thread-like hyphae into ropes and so we can glimpse the underground world on a tree stump.

Getting ready for this festival of bafflement I’ve done what I always do and read a lot of books that are way beyond my understanding, in the hope that some of the research sticks . I won’t bore you with a list except to say that for the last year I’ve been gradually searching for second hand copies of the most important ones. I can never afford to buy new academic books – they’re ridiculously expensive and only for well-heeled university libraries. There’s also loads of good stuff available online; especially on the British Mycological Society Facebook page.

What I’ve learned has given me an entirely new perspective on the benefits of fungi not only to our ecosystem but to our health and wellbeing as well. These days we’re very familiar with the importance of pollinator plants at the beginning of the life process. We’re not so thoughtful about what happens at the end. At its simplest, without fungi we couldn’t survive because whatever lives also dies, at which point the fungi move in and reduce the senescent remains to their original constituents. Without fungi the earth would be covered with a layer of dead material of unfathomable depth. Sometimes, as any farmer or gardener could tell you, the fungi move in too soon and finish their lunch and our crops before we’ve been able to harvest them. The problem with drenching the field or the garden with fungicide is that without the silent work of fungi there would be no soil in which to grow the next crop because the overwhelming majority of plants and trees have what’s called mycorrhizal relationships with fungi; a constructive and complementary relationship in which the fungi supply essential nutrients to the plant in return for some of the photosynthesised sugars which its leaves produce. There is some evidence – because mycelial relationships are so important to the health and therefore the eventual crop; that fungicides can weaken the plant and make it even more vulnerable to fungal pathogens. The invisible work of fungi is immeasurably more important to us than merely filling a forager’s basket. Of course there are many more gifts from the fungi than I’m going to write about here but I want to concentrate next on the meaning of those beneficial relationships.

Porcelain fungus on beech tree

Let’s begin with Robin Wall Kimmerer whose books – as she describes them – focus on how “The factual, objective view of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people”. When we talk about ancient knowledge whether we’re embracing plants or religious, spiritual issues, it’s almost impossible to say anything without using metaphorical language. I’d argue that myth is the way that we try to tell some species of truth about mysteries. When Kimmerer writes about “mother trees” she’s using a metaphor to describe a positive relationship. “Mother trees” don’t breast feed their saplings or worry when they get home late from a night out. But it may be that there is a mycelial fungal connection between trees that allows the older trees with more resources to share those resources to nearby younger trees. What the metaphor achieves is to communicate in simple terms an important concept awaiting scientific verification. A wood or a forest is an unimaginably complex network of invisible connections which can sustain mortal damage if it’s damaged by thoughtless management. It’s a way of looking at trees which takes a broad, almost spiritual view of their meaning to us.

But just as I was about to write, I caught sight of a recent piece in the Guardian referencing fungi purely as a kind of industrial and scientific feedstock. It’s an interesting article about some possibilities of extending the use of fungi to produce building materials, packaging and even for biodegradable nappies (diapers). The science of using fungi to clean up industrial pollution is well advanced, so this is hardly big news. But what caught my attention was the way in which the article perfectly captures the contrast between two ways of looking at nature in general and fungi in particular. Kimmerer’s almost spiritual account, inflected by First Nation tradition and wisdom versus the highly instrumental scientific and rationalistic way of looking at nature as a free resource and a means of making money.

The question, or perhaps the takeaway from the two perspectives is that if we accept that climate catastrophe; species extinction; mass migration; global instability; pandemic and the degradation of the environment are all the result of our almost universally instrumental view of nature; wouldn’t it be better, rather than to join in the ugly scientific pile-on dismissing the ideas of Kimmerer and many others to allow that without a reset of our perspectives towards nature there can only be one result – and that’s the destruction of the earth.

Touching the fullness

St Anne’s Well where the spring emerges

I’ve written about this special place before after I rediscovered it on a recce with some friends in Bath Natural History Society, and you can read a fuller version of the background there. What I didn’t explore in that piece was the much broader context which involves a brief encounter with psychogeography which is part of the explanation of my curious habit of walking about a mile to Downend to catch the number 18 bus into Bristol rather than catch the number 4 which would have been much less effort. Psychogeography examines the why of our relationship with places. However there are a few bear traps once you get beyond the material explanation of springs, sinkholes, clumps of trees and notable hilltops which can take you straight to Alfred Watkins and his leylines which I’m not going to write about.

The hard bit – freel free to skip to the next paragraph

The basic premise of these thoughts is that for me – and this is a highly subjective discussion – there are certain places which seem to be associated with raised mental energy; with a sense of connection which, after all the factors of memory, intellectual and aesthetic interest have been factored in, still leaves a surplus. I guess it’s hardly pushing beyond the boundaries to describe this in terms of energy because although the brain is only 2% of our total body weight it consumes 20% of our energy. The exact relationship between the brain and what we call the mind is a bit of a hot topic, the two are obviously closely related in an energetic process. The problem as always is that the laypersons’ language we use to describe these elevated senses is always metaphorical. ‘We feel inspired’, we say, and the scientist in us says ‘that’s all very well but what does it mean? – do you mean that that we feel breathed on? ‘

Back to earth

Maybe this is a job for the poet and storyteller. There’s the Greek myth of the omphalos, the navel of the earth which in their case was in Delphi where they built a temple and where, for a fee, you could be told about the future in ambiguous terms which avoided any possibility of reprisals after a wrong answer. I was sent to a Primitive Methodist Sunday School as a child, and I somehow managed to take away from it the unexpected conviction that I needed no guide, priest, or guru to instruct or shape my imagination. There were abundant facts, certainties and structured thoughts in the municipal park of the ordinary where we were told to keep off the grass and respect the ranks of tulips and daffodils. I always wanted to walk on the grass. My imagination would not be contained by the iron gates and the cracked chime of the clock in the park. I was taught that God was an angry old man whose principal joy was smiting. There was a lot of smiting at Sunday school which was up a narrow lane that led to the back of the butcher’s shop, passing their small slaughterhouse where there were no windows but iron bars. There was never any doubt about the torments that awaited us since they were listed most weeks by preachers whose lips were flushed with the anticipation of the ruin of most of their neighbours. From the age of six I was planning my escape.

I think my first experience of the Fullness must have been on Rodway Hill when I was in my very early teens. I lay there amongst a drift of fine grass and Harebells that I now understand are only there because there’s a cap of old red sandstone whose acid soil suits them. It was there I first experienced what came to be known by Rolland and Freud as the Oceanic and I disappeared for I don’t recall how long. I became attached to a physical landscape – acid heath – which I can never visit without recalling that moment but hefted also within a different inner landscape that came and went as it pleased. The real of science and materialism had been compromised by a newcomer – the really real or perhaps the Fullness. The Fullness was not and could never be the vengeful god of smiting and retribution because he was an imposter, a fraud, a projection of thwarted dreams. It’s important that I explain this because in the next section I take this strange dimension as a “given” in writing about places.

So is this presence really tied to a particular place? Are we talking here about the old Roman idea of the “genius loci” – the spirit of a place – or is it even possible to use the term spirit in the context of place in the 21st century. Certainly some places have associated powers. St Anne’s well – the one in the photo at the top- was known for healing eye complaints. There was a St Arilda’s well in one of my parishes which was associated with a very similar legend to the one about St Winifred in Denbighshire, North Wales. Both were martyred , and in both legends the water was said to run red at times as a reminder of their death. Another well in St David’s is dedicated to his mother St Non.

Just creeping in at bottom right is a plant named Pellitory of the Wall, Parietaria judaica, which was once used as a treatment for urinary complaints. St Non’s would be, for me, the destination for any pilgrimage to St David’s. Away from all the tourists and gift shops it’s even missed by many walkers; but I’ve dangled my feet in it when they were sore from walking and it’s very refreshing indeed. It marks the place where the story says his mother gave birth to him alone on the clifftop in a thunderstorm. No pressure then Dewi!

I would call all these sites nodes. They’re all places where the membrane between the everyday and the Fullness is very thin. and they don’t move. Springs, wells, valleys, sinkholes, caves and promontaries; hills, outcrops and waterfalls; the confluences of rivers and streams – all of them can open occasionally to contemplative walkers and embrace them with the Fullness; but many other moments of transfiguration can happen in totally unexpected places at the times we feel least prepared. There’s no virtue to be claimed in it and no call for anyone to start a school; build a monument or set up a gift shop.

So yes, there are some sites,some places that are certainly filled with concentrations of whatever energy these healing, revelatory moments are fuelled with. Christian evangelicals tend to call it the holy spirit and then treat it/him? like an indentured servant, forever being prayerfully ordered around with pious hopes. But whatever the nature of the energy is; it has the capacity – provided we’re just ready to stop what we’re doing, to listen and to respond – the capacity to excite what you might metaphorically call our resonant frequency, which is the same frequency as the one that multiplies energy to the point where bridges collapse and windows shatter. Rudolph Otto called it the mysterium tremendum et fascinans; the numinous; the holy. But what it does, as it did for me, is set up a powerful, culture bending alternative to the way we do things round here.

So which is the more powerful would you say? is it the first photo of the mighty and beautiful cathedral, or the impoverished clifftop ruins? I know what I think.

When we were at art school in Wiltshire in the 1970’s I became very anxious and quite disturbed for about six months. I think it was a reaction to the first death I’d experienced of someone my own age; a friend of Madame’s. I couldn’t face college, was in danger of being thrown out, and I took to wandering in the By brook valley below Castle Combe. Sitting on the side of the brook which was really a small river, I made some drawings of a tree on the opposite bank, The roots were deeply entwined and knotted and I made (on reflection) the odd decision to draw with hard pencils. I was using a good paper which would take a great deal of punishment and although they were not masterpieces the enforced difficulty kept me there for a long time. Looking back, it was a similar kind of experience to the ones I’ve been describing except that it was slow and accumulative – so no fireworks or eureka moments but healing from the inside out. If ever I think of what the river outside the Potwell Inn might be like, I invariably think of By Brook, another place where I touched the fullness.

These experiences can’t be ordered up like a Deliveroo and so whilst our walks these days are often in search of plants and fungi, or we might be chatting about our children, I’m always on open channel just in case of a Visitation, and I don’t give a monkey’s whether it makes me sound crazy or if the magisterium could declare it heretical.

The view from the clifftop at St Non’s

Catch a bus – it could change your whole perspective on life.

Bath bus station – there are no pretty views!

I’m working up three posts at the moment and hopefully I’ll publish them all by the end of next week One of them is about what I’ve always called “nodes” – which is about places that seem to exude a lot of energy, hopefully without going full leyline over them. Secondly I’m researching a piece on the ways I’m trying to improve my photography to make it more helpful in identifying plants. The third, this one, is about buses and what travelling on then can teach us.

It’s a kind of in-joke among plant hunters that the maps we use to find and record plants are really maps of plant hunters. Cambridge, for instance, has a very high score when it comes to plant records, but it also has a very high score in terms of botanists. Statisticians have had to find some very smart mathematical models for removing the bias. I had a friend, now sadly dead, who was a prolific recorder of wildflowers. I’d describe him as brilliant and difficult, but he was always ready to help me out and taught me a great deal. The thing about him – Rob, his name was – was that he didn’t drive a car and so he travelled mostly by bus or by hitching lifts with other botanists. I’ve been watching a particular group of plants called Fleabanes for several years now. They can be quite tricky to identify and there are three very similar species, two of which grow in Bath and another which seems to be making a slow journey up the river from Avonmouth. So two possible reasons for the slow journey are firstly that the seeds float or blow up the river. Floating is highly unlikely because the Avon flows in the opposite direction. Wind dispersal is more likely because the prevailing wind direction is south westerly and the seeds are like miniature dandelion clocks. But looking at the maps, the records could as easily be explained by their position on bus routes. I’ve seen Rob on his hands and knees searching in the central reservation of a dual carriageway, so it’s entirely possible that the records really reflect bus journeys. I now feel obligated to search for the wandering Fleabane every year to continue his work.

These days I find doing the washing up infinitely more rewarding than listening to the recycled press releases which hide under the banner of journalism in these diminished days. But yesterday I caught several mentions of “the next war” being touted by almost all of them in a brain dissolving teaser for some kind of announcement about building more weapons factories. It reminds me that we all live in a particular cultural context from which we can never really escape. One of my radio producers once told me that she thought my best writing came when I was being lyrical. Well, it’s not a big stretch from being unable to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Babylon) to struggling to find the lyrical voice in a context like this, where lying, thieving from the vulnerable, accepting bribes and trading in weapons that dismember children is regarded as good business.

Rob was finding his lyrical on his hands and knees surrounded by the roar and fumes of fast traffic. Several people, Chris Packham for one, have mentioned hyper focus recently as one of the features of neuro divergence. Perhaps that’s it for some of us, although my own experience is that almost no amount of focus can get me past the feeling of despondency and gloom that this government promotes. If it has a vision at all it’s to spread passivity like a virus through the population.

Anyway, to get to the point – which is about travelling by bus – one of the major causes of passivity is isolation, and that isolation is enforced by illness, poverty, going everywhere by car, wearing headphones and creating your own impoverished environment by doomscrolling on the phone and listening only to your own curated soundscape. A bus, on the other hand is a tin box with six wheels and virtually no suspension which forces you into the company of people you’d never normally meet or speak to. At Bristol bus station a couple of days ago, paramedics were treating someone who’d collapsed on the floor. There were local and international travellers, shoppers and people going home from work looking grey; homeless people, students, schoolchildren and pensioners like us, taking advantage of the free bus pass. There were people of diverse colour and nationality, several slightly deranged people all jammed in, thigh to thigh and standing well inside my usual comfort zone. It’s a challenging and immersive environment in which anything could happen – and I love it. The late night bus is even more gripping. You always get one or two people the worse for wear. One one journey back to Bath there was one man who had no idea where he was; just got off the bus and wandered away in the dark. Another fell asleep with his kebab in is hand and it went all over the floor. Yet another man waved contentedly at his own reflection in the window, half recognizing a familiar face.

The point is – the people you meet on the bus aren’t your carefully curated version of reality but the real thing. Poverty and neglect of the elderly isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet, it’s the old man with his zimmer frame sitting in front of you who hasn’t had a bath or a shower in months and smells so bad that only the smell of a Mcdonalds being eaten by an overweight young person nearby manages to cover the crime like a cheap deodorant. These, dear Mr Starmer are the people you are supposed to be thinking about and working for, but you don’t travel on buses so you’ll never know about them. It’s no use blustering on about the deprivations of your own childhood. Your dad was a toolmaker, and many people will think he made tools like shovels and chisels. But that’s not what toolmakers do. They make the tools which are used in factories to manufacture aeroplanes and cars. Their work is immensely skilled and they have all done long apprenticeships – as long as many doctors. They work in tolerances of fractions of a thousandth of an inch on machines that cost more than a mansion and they are paid accordingly. I worked as a labourer in a tool making company in the 1960’s and they were paid more than double the average wage. They were and probably still are the creme de la creme among engineers because they could work for weeks on a press tool that, if it warped when it was sent off for hardening and cost thousands of pounds. Give it a rest, then, Starmer. All that carry-on about gathering around a single smouldering coal and eating stone soup doesn’t pass the Ernest Hemingway test for bullshit. You lived in a comfortable house and had a good education. Go ride buses for a week – I’d happily buy your pass for the good of the country – and meet the electorate. Get off the bus now and again and learn the names of some flowers; learn Welsh, (I slipped that one in – I never have, but I can pronounce Welsh place names properly; who needs vowels anyway? – work a day or two on a trawler; pick orders in an Amazon warehouse.

So how do I find the lyrical; find peace of mind in a culture of lies, failure and violence. Well, there is still beauty; beauty especially in nature. There is still love; there is still compassion that trickles out from the earth like a spring. It just isn’t coming from the Westminster goon show.

“Where’s the plan?” we ask; “What’s the strategy?”. But as anyone who’s done a management course will know. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Our problems aren’t caused by lack of strategy but by a degraded culture.

Before your very eyes – Cheshire cat plants are the lost smiles of nature.

If you’re up to speed with the latin names you won’t need me to tell you what they are. I’m using the common English names because they’re the place most of us start our journey as well as expressing the poetry of nature.

Actually (so far) one of these plants – the one at the top left – hasn’t yet joined the ranks of the disappearing but it’s still early days in the crisis of species extinction that’s barrelling down on us. So on the left, top to bottom there are the Small Scabious, The Sheeps-bit, often called Scabious as well, and the Devil’s Bit; ditto. The one on the right is a Common Restharrow – which was the initial impetus to write this post. I’m writing about these plants, and the reason I think you should be interested too is that seeing them is like looking at the prelude to a slow motion car crash.

I wonder if there was a smidgeon of irony in choosing bonfire night to launch the latest Red List – or to give its full name “A new vascular plant red list for Great Britain”. I can hardly imagine the great British public queueing around the block to get a copy before the ink dries, and it is very technical (but over the years I’ve already put in the hard miles); however it’s a duplicitous ten quid’s worth of ebook masquerading as a scientific survey when it’s really a requiem for a disappearing earth. Every paragraph is damp with tears – it’s the saddest list of names you’ll ever find in a book about plants.

Here’s a Google Gemini summary of the findings:

Increased Threat Level: The proportion of species assessed as threatened (Critically Endangered, Endangered, or Vulnerable) has increased 26% (434 species) are now classified as threatened, up from 20% in the previous 2005 list. A further 140 species are listed as Near Threatened, suggesting their conservation status is of concern.Widespread Declines: Many plants that were once common and widespread in the countryside have continued to decline and are now assessed as threatened.

So let’s start with the larger picture at the top of the page, in a way that’s also a defense of English plant names. The name Common Restharrow at least paints a picture. Having driven a little grey Massey Ferguson 35 and towed a chain harrow to aerate and tear out the thatch of dead grass whilst flattening molehills I get the joke. If I’d been doing the same job a century ago and leading a horse-drawn harrow I might have called the plant “rest horse”, because this little plant in a typically tangled mass can stop a harrow in its tracks. I’m thinking of the rain soaked agricultural labourers in Peter Brooks’ film of Ronald Blythe’s book “Akenfield”. Ononis repens defines the plant’s place on the spreadsheet down to ten decimal points, but fails to tell the story. Of course, unlike my Fergie, a giant turbo charged tractor would pass over without noticing – but it wouldn’t need to notice any more because Restharrow is disappearing altogether. It’s been moved up the parade of shame from “least concern” to “vulnerable” under the onslaught of intensive farming. I can still take you to see it, but it’s mostly on the coastal headlands in west Wales and Cornwall at the field edges, beyond the reach of sprays and ploughs.

And that’s where the sadness comes. The loss isn’t just technical – an entry on a spreadsheet – but a loss of memory, of relatedness, of history; it’s personal. Sun, wind and rain; strolling and rolling together with Madame; hours, days and weeks of searching followed by the moment of joy in finding. These are not the simple pleasures of an ice-cream at the end of the day’s plant hunting; they’re the joys of complete focus and engagement; of falling in love. This is a big deal.

In a recent posting I was writing about human grief in a very allusive way (which I hinted at in the title), and in parallel, I can’t stop wondering whether the loss of meaning when we lose someone close to us isn’t just damaging when what’s lost is a part of the physical world in which all our memories are embedded. In Stoke Row on, the edge of the Chilterns, my grandparents had a smallholding. More even than remembering what they looked like I can’t escape from associating them with the Beech trees that surrounded their cottage; from the sight and smell of the paraffin stoves on which granny cooked, and of the rich oily smell of chicken meal. I remember that the first squirrel I saw was a red squirrel, and I remember the line of trees at the back which my Mum would examine and proclaim that there was rain over Granny Perrin’s nest. My Mum’s favourite flower, she would say, was Lady’s Slipper – but which – of about ten alternatives did she mean? The orchid is now extinct so that leaves nine. When she died my sister and I were trying to decide where we could bury her ashes and we did a bit of research to see if we could return her to her childhood home. It was a powerful blow to discover that the Crest smallholding is now covered with an industrial estate. In fact it was even more of a bereavement to discover that I would never see the tarmac road dressed with flint pea-gravel again, nor gather primroses nor help to gather prickly and itchy hay to be stacked in stooks and ricks.

So let’s go back to the three Scabious, only one of which (top right) is really a Scabious. The other two, united by their similar appearance and vibrant pale blue-violet colour, kept me bewildered for several years although, once you know how, they’re worlds apart. I was always dazzled by the name Devil’s-bit. Such a plant must be special, I thought – like Viper’s Bugloss and Deadly Nightshade; it’s the names that draw me in like a moth to a flame. But Devil’s Bit and Sheep’s-bit never seem to grow side by side so the moment of revelation is more likely to happen in front of a decent macro-photograph or, in my case looking at the illustrations in Collins Wild Flower Guide and seeing – actually noticing – for the first time that the stamens on Devil’s-bit are like little mallets and on the sheep’s-bit they’re tiny little trumpets. Oh floods of joy! except what I recall more than anything else is where they grow, and they grow there because they are perfectly suited to their homes; to the weather and climate, to the soil, and to the grazing or cutting regime under which they can thrive. Change any one of those things and they’ll likely dwindle and disappear – not waving you might say – but drowning. One blisteringly hot day in the midst of a drought we shall go back and they won’t be there any more.

Maybe the flowering plants are nature’s way of smiling at us. I used the metaphor of the disappearing Cheshire cat’s smile at the top. Perhaps it’s the canary in the mine; whatever – it’s nature sending us a message that when the flowers go they take the joy with them.

Thrift growing on a clifftop in St David’s Pembrokeshire

Somewhere between the recycling depot and the destructor bridge there’s a spirituality of hope – but I can’t find it.

The new Destructor Bridge

Bath is a city divided by the river. Walking west to east along the towpath between Windsor Bridge and Churchill Bridge you follow the northern half of the city which bears the postcode BA1. BA1 is posher than BA2 because it’s got most of the expensive and Georgian parts. Then, at Churchill Bridge – (I’m sensing a bit of a pattern here because you will already have passed beneath Victoria Bridge) – it all takes a bit of a dive on the northern side as you pass the bus station, the railway station and the Southgate shopping Mall and then Royal Mail sorting office before you approach the end of Pulteney bridge where (if you dare) you can pop into the public loos over Waitrose and change back into your Jane Austen inspired Emma costume or pretend you’re Knightly according to taste and preference.

In many cities they demolish the old and build the new on top but in Bath, given that the tourist money has come from the old, for several centuries, they built the heavy industry and the ugly/smelly bits across the river out of sight. The Destructor bridge linked the upper Bristol Road to a giant incinerator which was next door to the gasworks and just along from Stothert and Pitts where they specialized in heavy engineering; cranes; bridges and transport across the British Empire. As industry died, plans were hatched by friends of the developers to “improve” the city by demolishing older buildings in favour of concrete tower blocks. You can read about this in the excellent and angry book “The Sack of Bath” by Adam Fergusson. We bumped into his daughter once in a pub in Hay on Wye and immediately recognised one another as kindred spirits.

Sorghum? where the hell did that come from?

It just so happens that we live near the towpath – just far enough away to avoid the smell of sewage as long as you hurry past a couple of the outflows in the summer. The towpath is my plant hunting ground; the place which never fails to reward me with something new; often a squatter or a vagabond. I reckon I could easily account for 50 species in my records, probably more. On Friday I went for a walk along the path to clear my head. On the opposite bank they’re clearing the old gasworks site in order to build hundreds of new flats – the river view would increase the value of an old air-raid shelter into six figures. The noise was horrendous, with drilling, piling and lorries everywhere. The spirit of the old destructor bridge lives on with a twenty first century sound-track. On my side of the river I passed the recycling centre which is joined by the relatively new version of the destructor bridge which clung to its name but lived up to its reputation when they discovered it was a bit too long or maybe too short when they came to lift it into place and retreated bloody but unbowed for months as the designers licked their pencils and tried to find someone to blame. Fortunately it wasn’t called the Prince Andrew bridge because that would have taken nominative determinism to the level of farce.

But I was there clearing my head because the previous week we had attended the funeral of a young friend, just 40 years old from bowel cancer and I needed to find that kind of safety in numbers that lets me escape into a spreadsheet for a couple of hours. Walking past the destructor bridge and the recycling centre seemed to be hauntingly significant as I recorded and photographed the ordinary, everyday plants that most of us ignore as if they were strangers in the street. Ivy leaved toadflax, cocksfoot grass, alkanet, broad leaved dock, ribwort plantain, blackberry, ivy, herb robert, false oat grass, buddleia, marsh figwort, common ragwort; red valerian, groundsel, bilbao fleabane, gallant soldier, pellitory of the wall, mugwort, tansy, several kinds of dog rose and annual mercury. I fear I’m writing a book of remembrance for the weeds I pass in the street as the climate catastrophe intensifies.

We tend carelessly to describe grief as a kind of temporary and solvable disturbance of the mind. Time, we say, is the great healer. But it’s not, I want to scream. Bereavement. and the grief that explodes in us when it happens, more closely resembles a stroke. It destroys memory, reshapes the world in unfamiliar ways so we can’t recognise the places we once knew. The loss of a limb just as the loss of someone we love, can’t be mitigated by positive thinking and we don’t get over it – ever.

And I feel as if I’m suspended between the grim spirituality of destruction and the optimistic recycling of fading memories. The river becomes the Styx in this uninvited metaphor. The noise, the roar and pollution of the bulldozers and lorries on one bank and on the other the recycling centre where we take the things we no longer want – to be reprocessed into something else. On the one bank letting go completely and on the other, clinging to the hope that something may be retrieved while we rather desperately make records and take photographs, out of which – one day – it might be possible to build a spirituality of hope in a world where God – like Elvis seems to have left the building.

Creeping Thistle – Cirsium arvense

A little death – no not that kind

The gracious muddle that I prefer to write in

It’s not that I wasn’t warned – WordPress has been telling me for ages that something to do with Google apps was about to stop working but, being both lazy and unable to understand most of their technical information I ignored it and put it aside with letters from the bank and HMRC.

I ask this as a kind of rhetorical question: what could cause you most distress? …. a diagnosis of some rare but curable disease or losing your phone? Having been on three fast-track referrals for suspected cancers (none right) in as many months I can tell you that my world ended momentarily when I clicked on WordPress yesterday only to be told that “it” (no amplification) was no longer supported. It took a few minutes of intense meditation and heart-rate control to determine that the bereavement was far more limited than the extinction of ten years of work. The only thing that had happened was that a small shortcut app to the blog has been discontinued following a bit of a theological row between several behemoth sized companies about the number of blogger brains you can arrange on the head of a pin.

The remedy for this temporary extinction event was simple. I just had to search for the Potwell Inn and up popped my site with everything apparently working. However, my insatiable curiosity soon got the better of me and I ended up searching for my blog on Google Gemini, the AI app where I received a full report on the Potwell Inn which described all of my topics of interest in detail and (I thought) rather approvingly. There was a tendency to centre things on my more recent postings which gave the location of the Potwell Inn as Doynton – a small village near here where I once (maybe 50 years ago) did a talk for the young farmers but where we occasionally visit the local pub which I’m happy to give a shout-out to. The Cross House does some good food in a lovely atmosphere but it’s not the Potwell Inn, largely because the Potwell Inn – in the form that I write about – doesn’t exist anywhere except in my imagination and in my memories of HG Wells’ comic novel A History of Mr Polly from school days where it was a set book. The mere mention of the author and title should alert you to the archaeological nature of my affection for a short novel that, as a very shy and bewildered; possibly neuro-diverse teenager, built up as a safe space in my mind.

So the bad news for those of my readers who have wasted time searching for the Potwell Inn (one actually turned up on the allotment one day, and another wrote to me about one of the several imposters that actually exist in bricks and mortar) I’m sorry. The Potwell Inn is just a mental bolt-hole for an undiagnosed neuro-diverse old bloke, tumbling at speed towards his 80th year. On the other hand everything else, everything I’ve ever written about is real. Madame is my real partner of 60 years (we met when she was 15) we really have an allotment and all the plants, fungi, places and adventures are true, the campervan and it’s multiple vicissitudes is real too. So the really amusing fact is that Gemini got everything completely right about the Potwell Inn apart from one very important detail: it doesn’t exist.

Now I always thought that the power to confer existence on a being – and even the word being seems to confer some kind of existential reality – but stepping away from that whirlpool – the power to confer existence is reserved to God, or the Tao or some kind of immortal, invisible, ineffable superpower. If you look for Google Gemini in the scriptures you won’t find it lurking anywhere in the prehistory before Adam and Eve had to get their kit on in a hurry and Cain murdered Abel. I mean, seriously, Google doesn’t figure before sex and death (the subject of the only joke I can remember my lovely psychoanalytic psychotherapist Robin cracking. I’d told him about a dream I’d had of walking down Hotwells road being followed by two elephants. He replied with “I’m a Freudian, they must be sex and death!”)

Anyway, I think I’ve uncovered the Achilles’ heel of the whole AI bubble. It confers existence where it has no right. We avoid UPF’s – Ultra Processed Foods- but they only kill us one at a time. Ultra Processed Facts can kill whole families, cities, cultures; in fact there seems no limit to its potential for harm. Going back to the bible just for a moment (I promise) you might wonder why idolatry gets such a bad press; even making it to Moses’ ten most wicked things in the Guardian. The answer is that what idolatry does is worship the partial instead of the whole incomprehensible but beautiful thing. It takes the easy way around the mountain.

So to get back to the Potwell Inn, you’ll see one category that I never use – it’s the one entitled Uncle Jim. He is the violent drunkard brother of the licensee of the fictional Potwell Inn, known only as the fat lady. Gemini, by the way, can’t bring itself to use the word fat and substitutes plump thereby daring to change the text! Polly accidentally removes Uncle Jim from, well- life I suppose – in a farcically comical fight which accidentally gives him a new identity. I don’t use the Uncle Jim tag because in my version of the Potwell Inn he’s gone forever, vanquished and washed up on a beach wearing the wrong jacket. All other contenders for the Uncle Jim slot are automatically given life-bans from my pub. The little river runs gently by, unpolluted by agricultural runoff and raw sewage. Beavers build their dams upstream and wildlife flourishes on the banks. I just need one place in my head where the darkness has no dominion.

Not the Potwell Inn

Autumn continues to come good.

Well the last ten days were a bit of a challenge but at last the polyps (six more of them, including a real biggie) have been removed from my colon and my system is almost recovered from fasting followed by 24 hours drinking drain cleaner and a morning under sedation at the local hospital watching the job being done on a big screen. I found out later that they’d given me a combination of pethidine and midazolam which were the reason I was able to not wriggle/scream/ or change my mind. As is the nature of these drugs I can barely remember what went on and as for the bus ride home it’s blank. I can remember the exact moment they wore off, though, as if a curtain was lifted and when I read the consultant’s notes I had the usual post-operative WTF? moment. On the plus side the (award winning) team were lovely and kindness itself.

So …. the campervan was fixed on tuesday after being recovered for the second time with a non functioning clutch. On Sunday we checked out Morrison’s garage at the Mall and they still sell LPG, so we’ll be ready for the next adventure as soon as they re-open the road through Pilning, and today we had our flu and covid top-ups and pressed a big bag of apples for juice during the afternoon.

Having decided to carry on with the allotment we’ve been working hard every day getting beds cleared and prepped ready for planting up. There are over a hundred broad bean plants of different varieties growing steadily in the greenhouse in their root trainers and very gradually we’re getting back on track. It’s been a magnificent year for the apples, and all of the trees planted in 2021 have fruited this year, which has created a new challenge for us because in spite of my careful records, it looks as if the nursery had mislabeled some of the trees, and in one row of five the first and last had been wrongly labeled – so Winter Gem and Grenadier had been transposed. This was the first time we’d been able to see the problem. The red- skinned apple on the left was one we inherited and we’ve never known for sure what it is but have gone (provisionally) for Ribstone Pippin and the green one on the right is Winter Gem which, ‘though it doesn’t look all that nice is actually delicious and very fragrant. The red spots on the skin are caused by a reaction between oxygen and the skin as the apple ripens off the tree.

Apple identification is a difficult skill to learn because it includes consideration of the horizontal and vertical section of the fruit; its shape, whether conical or round; exact description of skin colour; streaking; degree of greasiness; flowering and ripening times, the colour of the exposed fruit and the degree of russeting and you have to do a lot of it before you can be proficient. We spend a lot of time on the National Fruit Collection website – it’s extremely thorough and well worth bookmarking.

Anyway, while I was feeling sorry for myself a very divisive philosophical issue came up on the allotments when a member wrote a rather cross Facebook message about “rubbish” being “dumped” along the fence line at the bottom of the site. Madame absolutely forbade me to respond, but I feel safe here to write that there has been a growing problem, and distance, between those allotmenteers who believe you are only closer to God in a garden as long as you’ve slaughtered every blade and leaf of plants which you didn’t grow for food or aesthetic pleasure. Wild animals too, but especially badgers rats and foxes, oh and squirrels and mice – oh alright then – cats too are not permitted either. As for insects and above all caterpillars, need I say more?! At the greener end are those who, like us, keep a trail cam to enjoy the nocturnal visitors (which also include deer); we control the rats by never chucking the remains of Friday night’s takeaway on the compost heap because we know that rats originally came from India and love a curry. We have a scuzzy looking pond in which rat-tailed maggots can grow into hoverflies, and we allow lots of weeds to stay – especially nettles – because some rarish butterflies love them, and some lovely seed-setting grasses for the birds to chomp on. We obviously don’t want the Whites to eat our brassicas and so we net them carefully. Sweetcorn needs fortifications to keep the badgers out and so it goes on. Our allotment is, by the standards of the evangelicals and fundamentalists of tidyness, messy; but here’s the point. Nature just loves messy, and over ten years we’ve been visited by a dozen relatively rare plants which stay for a year or two and then move on. There was Peruvian apple, Stone-parsley, Bullwort, A rarish form of Fumitory, and others too. All-comers are welcome to come and raise a family over a couple of seasons and if some people think they’re just weeds it’s their loss.

Our relationship with nature is a conversation in which (for instance – like the apple trees) no-one speaks for four years and then something important happens. We accept that the plot we rent is not ours, but belongs to two of us (two legged creatures) and all of the other creatures from deer down in size but not importance to amoeba and thence to pollens and yeasts. We cannot compel but, as the astrologers say of the stars, we can only dispose, and if you don’t talk to the plants how will you know what they need?

So if we empty our buckets of trimmings, prunings and nuisance weeds like couch and bindweed along the fence we’re not dumping them (with all the negative connotations of that word, we’re putting them there because as they rot down to return their nutrients to the earth they provide a place of safety for dozens of species like woodlice, spiders, ladybirds, all kinds of pupae, field mice, hedgehogs and slow worms whose contributions to pollination, clearing up infestations of blackfly and suchlike, eating rotting leaves and aerating the soil – we rely on. We are part of a vast interdependent food chain. We do not dump plastic waste, old pushchairs and mattresses crisp packets or discarded drinks bottles and cans.

But we do process and store all sorts of delicious food that would otherwise be wasted. These tomatoes were picked green from dying vines after the drought, and ripened in the dark so they could be reduced to a roasted passata which keeps for at least a couple of years and is as good as pixie dust for bringing a pasta dish to life.

The return of the Red Headed League – who says nature has no sense of humour?

Sycamore moth caterpillar – Acronicta aceris

I wrote this post 13 months ago and then, for some reason, never published it and it’s been sitting in the drafts folder ever since. I used to have a producer on the radio who would say -“I know what you’re trying to say, and I know that you do too – but you haven’t actually said it!” – and re-reading it yesterday I think it fell into that category; so I’ve tweaked it a bit and added a couple of paragraphs to say what I was actually trying to say and I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it worked.

Rather an arresting sight on the pavement outside the flat today. I wondered for a moment whether caterpillars have hen parties but obviously this one wasn’t wearing a tiara so I didn’t bother to look and see if there were any tipsy bridesmaids about. I don’t think the Sycamore moth is particularly rare but I would have noticed had it crossed my path. Anyway, it must have fallen from the tree outside and was making its way across the road to the relative safety of the Green – relative safety because it would surely make a tasty snack for a gull – or a magpie, what with the ginger wig and all.

I frequently have trouble trying to figure out what my real vocation is; I’ve done so many things – but there’s always been writing somewhere in it. I fell in love with the natural world as a child and now I’m a passable amateur field botanist but when I sit down to think about it, what really gets my juices flowing is the beauty of plants; their histories, traditional names and uses for food and medicine and their journeys around the railway yards of Europe. DNA and microscopic identification skills are no more exciting to me than completing a hard crossword; fun but not significant. I get as much thrill from the Biting Stonecrop outside the door as I would from finding a ghost orchid (unless it was in the pavement outside!), and I don’t have a tidy mind so I like to root around on my hands and knees to find plants rather than see them displayed like zoo specimens in wire cages and bare earth. If it came to a choice between writer and botanist it would have to be a writer – a no brainer. Latin binomials have their uses of course, and when it comes to the correct naming of plants they’re essential, but where’s the romance in it?

The abundant Mexican Fleabane here could be and often is seen as a weed. I just don’t get it. Last week the official council weed scraper laboriously removed nearly all the plants along the bottom of our retaining wall but then stopped when he came to a glorious waterfall of the daisy lookalikes at the corner and put his scraper away. The bottom of the wall is now alive with the resurgent leaves of Nipplewort, Dandelions and Hemp agrimony which simply shrug off the insult. The whole object of a plant, I suppose, is to be visible and visited by pollinators. You’d think that for caterpillars the opposite would be the case; that they’d make themselves as invisible as possible until they’d pupated and emerged in their final forms. Not so, though. The ginger Sycamore Moth caterpillar, like so many of its cousins, doesn’t even try to be cryptic in its appearance. Does it actually taste filthy or does it just look as if it will. There’s an extravagance in nature which breaks all the bounds of decency and order – especially if you happened to be a Victorian philosopher like John Ruskin who once wrote of Selfheal:

It is not the normal characteristic of a flower petal to have a cluster of bristles growing out of the middle of it, or to be jagged at the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish’s jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into into the likeness of a diseased gland in an animal’s throat.

John Ruskin, Proserpina – quoted by Richard Mabey in his book “Weeds”

Richard Mabey’s book, cited above, is an erudite source of wisdom about weeds that deserves a place on any bookshelf. In his description of Self Heal he mentions the visual effect of swathes of the plant as akin to “brazed copper”. Ruskin seems to have had a bit of a thing about the colour of copper. One account of the reason for his inability to consummate his marriage to the red headed Effie Gray was given by her years after their marriage was annulled – “the reason he did not make me his Wife is that he was disgusted with my person the first evening.”

I can only assume that Ruskin found much to disapprove of in the disorderly and occasionally ginger world of nature. Sometimes anarchy is just a way of describing something whose connectedness and complexity is utterly beyond us. Science is the scalpel to the butterfly net of the poet’s work. Reductive or expansive – that’s the challenge. Are the tools we use to engage with nature intuitive and imaginative, or laser focused, seeing nothing beyond the quarry?

Well, I’m for the butterfly net approach every time. Of course, in this critical age of triple breakdown; environmental, climate and economic, we need science as never before, but just as I’ve always taught, myths are the way we tell the truth about mysteries – and the intuitive, expansive and imaginative tools of the poet are every bit as important as the scanning electron microscope and the DNA printout. To choose just one approach to nature wilfully limits our understanding. Slippery and indefinable as it may be, to exclude beauty from our calculus is to take us into Gradgrind’s miserable world. Ruskin’s failure to appreciate Effie Gray’s sensuous beauty was a failure of his humanity. He pursued her, courted her and married her so he could push a pin through her heart as if she were a trophy butterfly.

But enough! I bet you didn’t know that John Masefield liked to keep a box of rotting apples under his desk to fire up his imagination. Stanley Spencer kept something entirely more unpleasant near him but you’ll have to google for that. We have a neighbour on the allotments who has a tree laden with quinces which have the most lovely perfume, enough to fill the whole flat, and every year we put a bowl of them on the table. I’ve made quince jelly in the past and believe me they’re as tough as old boots and need a lot of cooking. When you cut through the fruits the black pips have a positively satanic look and they also contain hydrocyanic acid.

Of all the virtues of nature we mustn’t ever forget its sensual pleasures. For us, it’s more than just the necessity of eating, or growing or intellectual understanding because every one of the senses is engaged in a merry dance. Autumn is not merely mists and mellow fruitfulness, it’s celebration, festival, recollection and thanksgiving, singing, dancing and feasting. Oh and it’s also available in copper coloured.

Set like a spinnaker in a south-westerly, here’s our drought-beating chard

From this autumnal end of the telescope, the past growing season – which we’d written off as disastrous – needs a more nuanced description. Yes the bindweed had a marvellous time, and the couch grass invaded from the abandoned allotment below us; the tomatoes in the polytunnel suffered in the unbearable heat and so it goes on. We were very discouraged and even considered packing it in; but Madame held firm and, in the light of our late harvests, things don’t look so bad after all. Once we’d decided to carry on, the obvious starting point was to clear the beds and prepare them for next spring. We made the decision to leave the borlotti and the runner beans on their teepees for a week or so to see if the scattered blossoms would bear any late fruit, and that was a wise choice because both crops came to life after the rain and gave us a smaller than usual but welcome crop. The late tomatoes set a big crop of unripened green fruits which we picked as we cleared the tunnel and stored in the warmth but covered in some black plastic. It seems they don’t need light as much as they need warmth and we’ve been able to replenish most of our stores of passata. When I came to clear the potato beds they too had bided their time and although the skins were a bit tough, (a common problem across the allotment this year), we’ll have plenty for the winter. Our apples, pears and plums gave us their biggest ever pickings – they were only planted in 2021 – and the strawberries which failed miserably have come back to life and are producing many strong runners which we’ll use to make a new bed over the winter. Today, fired up with energy, I set to repairing some rotting edgings and tending to a commercial blackberry that’s repaid a great deal of TLC with some new growth. The rhubarb too has thrived so – all in all – and supplemented by our stores of frozen, pickled and bottled food we shall look forward to the winter with confidence.

But every silver lining has its cloud and two days ago we had another break-in on the site and this time they came equipped with bolt-croppers and cut through the tension wires on the fence, making it easier to pass things into the lane. However they weren’t very bright, and neither were they very lucky it seems. None of us keeps anything except mostly old hand tools in our sheds and in our case they sheared off the padlock and then went away empty handed when they discovered a second mortice lock. They may, of course have noticed the trail-cam pointing in their direction and had a moment of enlightenment before they scarpered. Over the years we’ve lost hundreds of pounds worth of equipment, had the toughened glass in the greenhouse smashed and the polytunnel slashed. Our other problem is what we call ‘shopping’. Unknown people enter the site and steal fruit on an industrial scale. Trees are stripped bare. If we see people who shouldn’t be there we ask them to leave, but I caught a well dressed local restaurateur one sunday morning with several bags stuffed with stolen figs from our neighbour’s tree. Contrary to common sense – which is all too common but not in a nice way, and not the least sensible – there’s not a shred of evidence to support the idea that lawlessness is confined to hoodie wearers, rough sleepers and foreigners. How much carbon do they emit compared with the besuited occupants of huge child killing SUV’s which ignore the 20mph speed limit outside the allotments because rules, like taxes, are for the little people. Lawlessness is a societal and cultural problem, and so is homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse and it spreads its tentacles throughout the whole of society. The malignant spread of selfishness and greed has been given free reign for fifty years and it could take fifty years to repair the damage. Criminalising environmental protest, locking up pensioners for demonstrating against genocide and extracting millions of litres of water from the Thames and replacing it by pumping (poorly) treated sewage effluent back into the river is most certainly not the answer. Jobs, education, youth clubs, training for decent jobs, proper healthcare and housing for all, the fear and financial stress of the elderly taken seriously and adequate mental health provision for the casualties of blighted childhoods all these are the vital signs of effective governance, not more Big Brother nonsense from out of touch politicians. Do I sound cross ???

Q: Which of us would dream of letting our families starve because we wanted keep all our money for ourselves?

A: The kind of person who has utterly lost any moral sense of direction.

Mending the nets

Anyway, we bought a new padlock for the shed and spent a few hours in the sunshine working on the warm earth. It was lovely and as we worked I pondered the reason why so many of our crops survived the drought and heat waves. Last week Joe (our supplier) carried half a ton of manure down to our plot at the bottom. That’s been the minimum amount every year for ten years and my guess – what with all the other compost we’ve made and scrounged – is that approaching ten tons of organic matter has been added and worked into the beds which, when we took the plot on, were nothing but couch, bindweed, old carpets (don’t even think about it!!) clay and starved looking earth. Digging the potatoes before it rained, the earth was black and crumbly, smelt like earth should and was still a bit moist six inches down. Soil regeneration by increasing organic matter is slow, expensive and hard, but it works – and with climate change increasing its grip year on year (sorry, but think SUV’s again) it’s the only show in town if we hope to grow healthy crops to feed ourselves. I’ll finish with a photo of one of the cleared bed awaiting its food for the year, a layer of cardboard from our recycling area and a cover of weed-control mat. “Tomorrow shall be our dancing day”

Délicieux

Délicieux – “delicious” in English apart from its normal usage is also the title of a 2021 French/Belgian comedy-drama film directed by Éric Besnard, which charts the rise of the first restaurants in France just before the French revolution. We watched it a couple of nights ago and allowing for the odd historical inaccuracy, like moving the action from Paris to the Auvergne region, charts the fall of the aristocratic elite of the day and the subsequent redeployment of hundreds of highly trained chefs into parts of France that had no tradition of eating other than at home in the family setting. It’s a great film, up there with my other foodie favourites because sometimes when we’re sick to death of the murderous and cynical events on the news we need a couple of hours of relief. And it’s always good in any case to see the ruling classes humiliated and shamed even if it’s only in a film. Well worth watching and under a fiver.

Anyway, it made me sit up and remember how and why I started cooking in the first place. Mum was a decent cook with a small repertoire of favourites. By the time Madame and I got together I’d never tasted garlic, green peppers or any of what the supermarkets still describe as exotic vegetables. So when we moved into our first flat; I was 21 and Madame was 18, neither of us had considered how we were going to feed ourselves. I’d hovered in the kitchen and watched my mum cook; she showed me how to judge the thickness of Yorkshire pudding batter by the sound it makes, and I could make a passable bacon sandwich. My dad literally could not make a cup of instant coffee! Madame still can’t recall her mother ever cooking a meal and so confronted with starvation we agreed to take it in turns to cook and that’s never changed.

At the same time we were exposed for the first time to a different cuisine as soon as we went to college and started to meet new people from different social backgrounds who invited us to their homes and whose parents (who probably thought of us as amusing waifs and strays) invited us to eat with them. I fell in love with the whole thing but we could never have afforded to eat out, so the only way we could eat like our better off friends was to learn to cook. I bought books, slowly accumulated a few pans and after walking miles looking for ingredients, practiced. It never occurred to me to train as a chef; my whole ambition was to be a good cook. There was a shop around the corner that sold cookware and I would spend hours looking through the window at the Le Creuset pots. I bought my first ever carbon steel knife there and resolved never to make-do with inferior equipment – which meant that my skills and equipment were glacially slow to improve. It was decades before we could afford to travel and see continental food at first hand.

Our problem was that so many ingredients were simply unobtainable. We learned the location of bay trees, rosemary bushes and other herbs. Sage and thyme were only available in bunches as Christmas approached so we foraged for what we needed in the leafy streets and gardens and eventually got ourselves our first allotment. It’s a well rehearsed truth that olive oil could only be obtained in tiny bottles at the chemist. Luckily we had a deli nearby, run by a Hungarian refugee who imported foods we’d never seen or even dreamed of. We learned to grow some food and we were lucky enough to find neighbours who could show us how to dress the chickens, pheasants and rabbits that found their way to our door. The local butcher showed me how to humanely kill and pluck a chicken. When I was a community arts worker I learned to be careful about expressing any food preferences, because some of the young men I worked with would go poaching to order.

Today we were sitting at the table shelling the borlotti beans to store for the winter. At lunchtime we had a tasting of several varieties of apple that we grow and ate chunky bread. After a dreadfully tough summer we were on the point of giving up the allotment but Madame kept the faith and we’re back on track once again preparing the ground for next season. Against all expectations the fruit crop; sweet apples, pears, plums, damsons and cookers has been the best ever. The borlotti crop was the largest yet and even the potatoes held fast in the ground right through the drought. Chard, spinach and most of the herbs survived too, with minimal watering. The tomatoes and peppers suffered in the polytunnel but now at last the rain has come and the water butts are slowly filling. Storage is easy but harvesting water is a bit more tricky. The greenhouse roof faces east and west, taking most of the weather pretty well. The water butts there fill quickest, but the shed roof slopes to the north and its three barrels are much slower to fill. So the trick is to pump water from the full barrels to the empty ones so that every drop is captured. I can see that the dramatic climate change we’re experiencing is not going to reverse any time soon and so droughts, extreme weather and storms need to be factored into our planning.

So now we ache in places we didn’t know existed, but we grow closer each time we go to the allotment. The shared physical work renders the gym subscription redundant and the mental challenge of planning it all is rewarded at this time of year in the kitchen and at the table, and there really is some kind of spiritual dimension to it. The news is terribly unsettling, and the uncaring viciousness of so many people provokes paranoia and despair; but somehow the simple act of plunging your hands into the soil, or sowing and harvesting your own food have the strange capacity to heal those hurts. Our friendships among the other allotmenteers brings us together in a shared interest with a huge range of people and skills. Doctors; nurses; teachers and professors muck in with many others with quite different life experiences. The allotments are, in the truest sense, a university.