Tag: influencers

This page is not sponsored by Dr Bowler’s Brown Bowel Oil Company.

The Widcombe Mummers in 2020

Actually this site isn’t sponsored at all, but runs at a built in loss because I created the site; write all the material; publish it (1008 posts and 824,256 words); take all the photos and pay all the bills. I have no desire at all to become an influencer and I cope with the money side by not looking.

I do like it when people read my stuff and like it, and I love it when my follower count goes up – who wouldn’t? – but just recently I’ve noticed a few corporate followers and when I check them out (I like to know who’s following and read their stuff) I discover that they’re pushing expensive pink website pills that will make me a pile of money and followers in return for ……..what exactly? I’d only sell myself if I could work out a price but unsolicited bundles of used notes are always acceptable. I guess it’s actually pointless writing this because they probably don’t read my stuff at all. I can imagine there are all sorts of AI bots crawling over it like maggots in a tin and stealing my copy. That would at least infect the next AI generation with a punctuation problem because all my posts are really scripts and written to be read aloud. The punctuation is a deeply obscure personal code to measure out exact packets of silence between words, clauses, sentences and paragraphs. The secret of writing for the ear is to control the silences. Apart from that I welcome GCHQ and other espionage agencies into my world because I love to waste their time – and if anyone is pinching my stuff I’d appreciate a credit at least.

I wanted to recall a true story of something that happened while I was training as a curate in St Mary Redcliffe Church – another institution with a bit of a branding problem. Every year Penny Bron (sadly no longer with us) and the people at the Cancer Care Centre in Clifton organised a glitzy Christmas carol service to which the great and the good flocked in their diamonds and fur coats. You could smell the mothballs. It was all forgivable because many thousands of pounds were raised to support her excellent work. After the service we were all usually invited up to the Mansion House to meet the exceptionally great and good for drinks with the Lord Mayor – that year it was Joan Jones who, for some reason, I’d really hit it off with. Then a couple of events happened that threw it all off course. Firstly the big star, The BBC chief correspondent Kate Adie, got called out to the Middle East because the prospect of the Gulf War was in the process of becoming a reality. Then a number of other celebrities were delayed, sick, or unavailable and so when it came to the reading of the nine lessons, we discovered after the service had started that we were three readers short. I was sitting opposite the boss and at the first long silence he nodded at me and I went to the lectern and read. I had a reading to do myself, so I returned to the lectern again. At reading number six I rose once again in my growing magnificence and then finally came the final reading from St John’s Gospel – again missing a reader.

I’ve got a bit of a thing about St John’s Gospel. The opening words invite us to see the creation as an entirely new beginning ex nihilo; a word, a performative utterance, something so unspeakably powerful that what was spoken came into being. A writer’s dream. I gave it everything I had. The page in front of me was a printed from the programme and as I reached the final sentence I spotted at the bottom, these words:

This page is sponsored by Pascoe’s Complete Dog Food.

If you are casting about for the perfect example of bathos please help yourself. After the service finished I was approached at the North Porch by a woman who said she had lost her husband. A little gentle probing – you can understand why – revealed that she’d arranged to meet her husband after the service but he hadn’t turned up and she thought he might have gone “straight to the reception” [this is the beginning of an hilarious misunderstanding]. I wasn’t intending to go because after a couple of years gasping with boredom, I just wanted to go home. So I said “oh well never mind I’ll drop you off there”. Off we went up to Clifton and swept into the Mansion House Drive where we could see the lights on but the main door was closed. I rang the bell and we waited for a while and then the butler – an enormously tall Cornishman, dressed for a career playing Scrooge in panto, opened the door and asked our names. This is a bit weird I thought, but he said “Follow Me” (I capitalised that because it was a kind of order) and so we did. I had no idea what my companion’s name was so we said who we were, followed him to a set of huge double doors which he threw open and introduced us by name.

The table was laid for the great and good and, as he announced us, my companion looked at me in blind panic and said “What do we do?” and I whispered “let’s just see what happens” at which point Joan Jones, bless her, understood what had happened and walked up to me; gave me a huge hug and a kiss on the cheek and ordered Poldark to set two more places and then set us down between Bernard Levin and Jenny Murray. Luckily my companion was in an evening dress and I was still wearing a Persian silk cassock which could get me in anywhere.

Dare I say, we had a marvellous evening. At around 1.00am I dropped her off at the Grand Hotel and said – “don’t tell your husband where you’ve been he won’t believe you.” The next morning she rang to say that the reception she was supposed to be at was at the Lloyds Bank headquarters. I’ve never seen or heard from her since.

Anyway – if you’re a corporate you’ll glean from this that I don’t like corporate do’s and I think sponsorship is ruinous. I do love good readers because without you all these hours at the laptop would be a complete waste of time, and I love followers who can cope with my scattergun posts. The next performance of the Widcombe Mummers is New Year’s Day at 12.45 on Widcombe Parade. There will probably be a performance by the Marshfield Mummers on Boxing Day at 11.00am in the Market Place – but you’d better check that. They have the most wonderfully inventive costumes made from torn newspaper. I’ve always followed Oscar Wilde’s advice that you should try everything once except for Morris Dancing and incest; but these old traditions (obviously not the incest one – this not darkest Gloucestershire) – are a kind of wormhole into the past.

Now, eight years out into the glorious liberation I can bear to recall Christmas as it once felt; relentless, exhausting and fun, and as I’m completely incapacitated by a cold I may write again before Christmas, but if not – have a good one!

Ten top tips for bloggers

You know how it always takes a while to figure out what’s going on, but surely (at least in the UK) we can agree that it’s a cold spring – and I don’t mean that we’ve had some cold weather because that goes without saying, but after being lulled into a sense that winter is over by a couple of balmy days, we’ve gone backwards by what feels like six weeks; chilled by a seemingly immovable wind from the northeast which only occasionally swings around to the west to gather some more sleet. Over in France and Spain too they’ve experienced some very extensive damage to crops, including grape vines. It’s difficult to make a direct link to the climate emergency but these extreme events have every appearance of being the smoking gun. Something’s wrong when the average temperature is way below normal and yet we’re having to water because the earth is so dry. “That’s gardening” we say to ourselves hopefully – “… you win some and you lose some”; but are we just kidding ourselves? In Bath we’ve had to cope with illegal levels of atmospheric pollution for years because local politics has been torn between reducing traffic and increasing income from students, businesses and tourism. Now, to add to the evil mix, the SUV has become the vehicle of choice for city centre aspirationals. It seems we all agree that something must be done, but the proposals for reducing traffic have been so watered down by the tourism and transport lobbies that the politicians are running scared. Councillors elected on a green manifesto to reduce traffic have crumpled under the pressure and there are rumours of palace revolutions while local bloggers have poured out their bile on those of us who challenge their so-called ancient freedoms – like driving a three litre Range Rover 1/4 mile to collect Tarquin and Cressida from school.

Anyway, all this cold weather presents us with a storage problem at the Potwell Inn, because a traffic jam of tender plants has built up and is now occupying every conceivable space in the flat, leaving nowhere to germinate the next wave of cucurbits; the cucumbers, squashes and melons – not to mention the sweetcorn and the runner (pole) beans. We’ve hatched a plan to construct a third unheated propagator under our original daylight fluorescent lamps because they give out far more heat than the newer LED’s. Desperation inspires ingenuity and we can probably get by.

Not all ingenuity seems to work, though, and I have to report that my genius attempt to lure the rats into the traps with exceptionally smelly camembert cheese fell upon deaf nostrils, as it were, and the hoped for carnage did not come about. It was at least reassuring that the trailcam worked perfectly. Alas we’ve yet to find a reliable way of controlling their numbers.

If you look very closely you’ll see the rat emerging fit and healthy from the trap before exiting down the path.

Much of the week has been taken up by getting the campervan ready for a single night on the Mendips to make sure all the systems are working properly. Our last trip – over a year ago – saw the electrics collapse in domino fashion and we spent the week reading by torchlight and huddled in the sleeping bags to keep warm. When the electrics go in a campervan nothing works – water pump, stove ignition, lighting and heating all go into a sulk. All this was replaced and patched up a year ago but during lockdown we’ve never had a chance to test it out under normal conditions. I’m almost anxious about taking the van back on to the road but, on the other hand, it’s spring and I’ve got a year’s botanising to catch up with. I think I’ll get back to grasses and try to identify the early risers. Goodness why I find it so exciting to know the latin name of a clump of anonymous green stuff with almost invisible flowers – but I do, and yes, Madame finds it inexplicable as well. Glory be! a new book on UK grasses is on its way to me and I’ve already polished the hand lens (this is not a euphemism). It’s called “Grasses A Guide to Identification Using Vegetative Characters” published by the Field Studies Council – end of plug, except to mention that you can get it from the NHBS bookshop which carries an amazing collection of titles on every aspect of natural history, and not so much as a third cousin seven times removed has links to them.

Finally, I’m publicly registering my ferocious dislike for any newspaper or magazine article headed “Ten top ****” I remember one of the chief reporters on a local paper telling me once that most journalists are irredeemably lazy and the best way of getting your copy into print is to do the job for them. A whole industry has grown up around this character defect; it’s called lobbying – and/or – dare I say – influencing in which winsome young people earn money by making videos of themselves promoting various kinds of snake oil. These videos readily supply ten best anything stories about anything from parma ham to windscreen wipers. In this way I was provoked by a “ten best” on the subject of growing veg.

As a potter, way back, I was often penalized for my passionate interest in technique. Somehow a whole generation of art schools managed to make a distinction between “technique” – which you had technicians for; and “talent”. The outcome of this lamentable attitude was that many students completed their degree courses without the least idea of how the elements of their pieces were conceived of and built, and how they all fitted together to make a finished piece. I remember visiting a degree show where I spotted a glaze that I’d designed as a favour to the technician in that department. The student, not knowing me from Adam, was astounded when I gave her the outline of the recipe. The very best students had a firm grasp of technique as well as the creative competence to carry out their ideas.

This need for technique applies just as much to gardening or cooking as it does to ceramics, and one thing I’ve learned over the years by watching really inspirational potters, gardeners and chefs is that there are always more and different ways of achieving what they’re doing. Being trapped by any sort of ten best ideology is like handing over your brains to a stranger. I’m miles too old and ugly to be a persuader but I’ve been tempted. However I’m constrained by the terrifying thought that someone might have been so impressed by my fluent and articulate promotion of camembert cheese as a rat bait that they actually bought shares in in a cheese company and created an online rat bait outlet with its own logo.

I remind myself of Ernest Hemingway’s comment to his daughter that the purpose of education is to teach us to recognise bullshit. I would hate to think that my epitaph might read “Dave Pole – he couldn’t tell shit from pudding!” – so please pay no attention at all to anything I write. My life is a work in progress – until it’s not.