Tag: slavery

There follows a short unedited video …….

Bath – the World Heritage destination.

Despair at my incapacity to crop and join together three short video clips is eating away at me. You’d think that in a community of millions of potential users, someone would come up with a simple and useable app, but it seems that feature rich is the way to go. I can insert clouds of dancing cherubs around my tomato plants, I can turn beetroot to the colour of a cholera patient’s cheeks and I can have the alleluia chorus playing over/under/through my commentary which – if I’m feeling in the flow I can even have read for me in expressionless gibberish by a robot voice. It’s all too much – and the only thing I can think of is to record the whole thing on my phone in one faultless take without once screwing my face terrifyingly at the lens to see if it’s working. The chances of not losing my thread and not tripping over anything – oh and not experiencing a painful cramp in my phone hand are a zillion to one. The thing is I’m constitutionally clumsy and I find geeky computer language even more incomprehensible than the doctrine of double predestination. Unlike my oldest son who is always discovering new tricks in his laptop, I’m a writer; that’s the bit I enjoy. I don’t enjoy ferreting around in the fox’s entrails of my little Chromebook looking for a way of unzipping videos that I never thought I’d zipped in the first place. The bit I enjoy is turning thoughts into words – it’s like herding cats – or rather it’s like herding cats with an overexcited spaniel. Neither the words or the thoughts lend themselves to a linear approach and so writing 1000 words for a post is mostly hand to hand combat in the labyrinthine corridors of my mind.

I also love taking photographs because they can often communicate whole fields of meaning at once. Putting the two together is powerful enough, and I guess adding videos would be even better but I don’t need the doric columns and all the other blather. I’m definitely an A+B+C person in the video department. Any helpful suggestions other than telling me to go and boil my head would be gratefully received.

So at the end of this piece there will be exactly one third of a trip around the Potwell Inn allotment complete with camera shake and a contribution from the endless flow of cars, lorries and emergency vehicles. The piece will be a quick trip around the polytunnel where, at last, the aubergines have started to produce fruits, along with the exuberant tomatoes and Minnesota Midget melons. To be honest, the tomatoes this year have been very sweet and lacking the acidity that I think is really important – so we have a huge crop of beta plus fruits – probably due to the extreme weather conditions. They’ll make plenty of the passata and sauces that we need the year round, but fresh and on the table, they’re a bit of a disappointment. As the temperature has reached 30+C every day, we’ve had a lot of watering to do.

As I was mentioning the traffic noise in the last paragraph a little think bubble popped into my mind and reminded me of a remark made by someone (probably a producer) who said that that I could write a passage of real lyrical depth, but that I would often deliberately destroy the mood in the next paragraph. Now if I was doing that unconsciously that would be troubling but I’m afraid I’ve always had my balloon firmly tethered to the ground and so for me the lushness of the allotment and the sound of the ambulances racing past belong in the same frame. I’m not peddling a version of the way we do things round here (the best definition of culture I ever read). The awful truth is, the torrent of visitors who visit Bath’s wonderful architecture and historical depth also offer a considerable source of income to the beggars and blaggers. Behind many of the Georgian facades are tiny flats and bedsits and a great deal of social housing that supports some very vulnerable people who self medicate and occasionally overdose on cheap alcohol and street drugs.

Yes this is a blog about allotments, and cooking and being human; and like it or loathe it, being human means being human in a place and a culture that will, indeed must, include the transcendently beautiful as well as the ugly. “Bath’s best bits” won’t do at all. The Assembly Rooms and the (soon to be demolished) Avon Street car park are equal parts of the story. As George Steiner once wrote of the work of a critic – “What measure of [sic] man does this propose?” What did John Wood the Younger think was the measure of humanity? What too did the designer of Avon Street car park think of us? Did John Wood include within his view of humanity the millions of enslaved people who generated the wealth that paid for his buildings?

I often think of William Cobbett – truth to tell, an appallingly opinionated old Tory – but who recorded for us an angry portrait of greed and rural poverty in the rural economy of the 1820’s. He peeled back the facade of a corrupt culture and recorded the suffering that lay out of sight beneath it. Out of sight in the Vale of Pewsey – quite near here – and definitely a highly desirable place to live today.

So if I sometimes mention the sight of a wretched shadow of a human being smoking crack on the green; or if I mention a stripper surrounded by screaming and drunken party goers in the same paragraph as I might record a musk mallow or an unexpected orchid, it’s because that’s what being human is. We’re all a bit morally dog eared and if we manage to snatch a few glimpses of the divine in the midst of all the untruths of our culture, then we’ve done well.

We sat and watched the last four episodes of the first series of “Baptiste” last night in the suffocating heat. Three throats cut, one decapitation with a chainsaw and innumerable smaller acts of cruelty were the lowlights of a script so threadbare and full of improbabilities that it was almost funny. But the eponymous hero Baptiste had at least one sensible line at the very end. Speaking about one of the victims who had been a collector of seashells, he said that perhaps one motivation of such obsessive collectors was to try to make sense of an otherwise chaotic world. Perhaps we urban allotmenteers and street botanists too, try to make sense of the chaos by growing plants and naming them.

If I have one wish in writing this, aside from offering the odd bit of dodgy advice, it would be to make an honest record of what it feels like to be human in this particular place and at at this moment of crisis – perhaps for my grandchildren to read – who knows?

Inside the polytunnel yesterday

What do we teach the children?


Sometimes reading a single book can make me sit up and think seriously about one of my own taken for granted understandings, but sometimes it takes a combination of two or three, read almost simultaneously. This past couple of weeks I’ve been reading three together:

Suzanne Simard – “Finding the Mother Tree”
Merlin Sheldrake – “Entangled Life”
Robin Wall Kimmerer – “Braiding Sweetgrass”

It’s fair to say that my grasp of what goes on under our feet on the allotment was – until recently – pretty scant. We had made up our minds to do our best to grow more pollinating insect attractors and dig the pond, but this is the first year we’ve set out to associate plants with their companions and the first time we’ve made an informed effort to try the three sisters method. I couldn’t say it’s made our life any easier as we’ve had to do a great deal of rearrangement and grow dozens of companion plants from seed. The no-dig philosophy was already baked in from the time we finally got the beds sufficiently weed free and rich in organic matter. The pond has been a triumph for the wildlife, with a crop of fat tadpoles already, and, at the weekend, three Large Red Damselflies – Pyrrhosoma nymphula two of them mating and laying eggs (Still joined together) on one of the pond plants.

Suzanne Simard and Robin Wall Kimmerer begin their stories – as it were – from opposite positions; Simard is representative of the settler traditions and Kimmerer of the First Nation/ Native American. Each writer seems to move through her life and scientific work, towards a more sympathetic understanding of the other. Merlin Sheldrake (and I’m simplifying horribly) struggles with the tension between anthropomorphism and detached observational science but concedes in the end that so long as we understand that we’re using metaphor to describe things for which we have no adequate words and that metaphors can’t be swapped for facts; then referring to the invisible networks and affinities that enable plants and trees to communicate in ways we don’t fully understand can fairly be described as like a brain. All three books are wonderful contributions to a changing mindset.

In my case I came away understanding much better not just the terrible and bitter effects that follow the destruction of a whole culture, but also the grievous loss of wisdom and experience embodied in it. To lose a language is to lose a way of thinking, and to learn one is to open the door to thoughts and understandings that can only be spoken in their native tongue. In the end, the culture, languages and philosophies of settlers and Native Americans alike were crushed and destroyed by extractive profit seeking and industrialized farming. In a much milder way we were schooled out of our local dialect and fed a completely bizarre diet of altered history to convince us that we were the most fortunate and blessed nation in the entire world. As a child, when there were no adults around we would speak in dialect using archaic terms like thee and thou and understanding perfectly without the aid of Eng Lit and William Shakespeare, that calling someone “you” was a distinctly cool form of address. The highest aim of our education was to make us middling; loyal and obedient to the status quo; so creativity and leaps of the imagination were ruthlessly stamped out. Here I am aged 74 and only now are the dreadful facts of slavery and colonialism being examined as part of our national story.

But we too have seen an ancient culture erased, enclosures and clearances driving people off their ancestral land and into cities. We’ve seen famine, poverty and disease accompanying the slums of growing cities populated by displaced people. My grandmother died of tuberculosis caused through poverty and overcrowding, and one of my great aunts died in the workhouse. You can’t say that we lacked knowledge of traditional medicines but they were useless against the diseases caused by overcrowding, poverty and poor sanitation. Thank goodness for modern medicines, but wouldn’t it be better if we could return to healthier ways of living? Slavery in the colonies was the bedrock, supplier of raw cotton, and paymaster to hundreds of thousands of jobs in the mills of Northern Britain – many of them involving children in arduous dangerous labour. Charles Dickens’ novel “Hard Times” paints a bleak picture of the consequences for the other end of the Atlantic slave trade.

We stretched the family reunion to five days with the bank holiday and it was joyful. Some of the grown-ups had breakfast together outside Widcombe Deli, on the pavement; we had a barbeque on the green; lots of walks outside and yesterday we got together with the grandchildren and their mum at Dyrham Park – our first visit there in 15 months. I could put up the family snaps, but they look just like everyone else’s family snaps. Viewed through loving eyes, of course, three children sitting on a tree branch is a Leonardo and, like Madame, they deserve their privacy so you’ll have to take my word for it – they are the cleverest, most beautiful and talented children ever to walk the earth!

So yesterday as I walked across the field at Dyrham Park with our grandchildren; the tongues and welts of my boots bright with yellow grass pollen I started showing the oldest how you could judge the fertility of the soil, and therefore the likelihood of finding some really good wildflowers, by looking at the vegetation. Too much nitrogen is the great enemy of plant diversity.

There was nothing much there except for rank grasses, ryegrass, cocksfoot and buttercups. Then I spotted a patch of darker green and I sent him over to take a look. Sure enough he shouted that he’d found a fungus and we went to take a closer look. It was a St George’s mushroom; named on account of normally fruiting around St George’s day – 23rd April; which goes to show how late the season is this year. So I cut it in half and showed him the white gills; gave it to him to smell – it’s an unmistakable smell often described as mealy which is pretty useless since you’d need to be over 100 years old, probably, to know what a sack of meal smells like. Then later I spotted another dark patch of grass and sent him off again to find some more. Finally we fetched up on a large ring that I know will produce parasol mushrooms in the autumn. As we left he brought me a leaf from one of the avenue of limes dotted with Eriophyes tillaes – gall mites. I was so delighted he’d got his eye in I said to his mum “I’m going to make an ecologist of him” (he’s only eight) and she said “good” – so I guess that’s permission to continue.

Later I was talking to our allotment neighbour – always known as Flash – about our day at Dyrham Park. His mum was born in Jamaica and he was born here in Bath and we discovered that we had both, as young teenagers, regularly climbed the walls of the park and trespassed on the estate. I wondered what we would have thought of one another if we had ever met sixty years ago, as trespassers in the shadow of the great house, built on the proceeds of slavery. Racism would always have been, and still is the elephant in the room. That today we can gossip as equals about growing beans and killing slugs is a kind of grace.

Time’s running out

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A friend in Australia wrote today about the situation in Tamborine Mountain, South East Queensland. Here’s what she wrote:

The water situation is now getting desperate. Families are completely running out of water, and having to wait weeks while the only local supplier tries to keep up with demand.  Meanwhile, multiple commercial extractors continue to take millions of litres of water to fill plastic bottles.  The creeks are dry and the trees are suffering …….

It’s a scary example of the global phenomenon we’ve come to describe as the climate catastrophe.  But of course the example says something else which is, or should be, equally challenging, because the global climate catastrophe and the global economic structure aren’t two problems, but one. The uncontrolled commercial extraction of water; the drought which is causing widespread suffering, the uncontrollable fires, the degradation of the environment and the destruction of forests, are symptoms of a single problem – I could go on, but I know there’s no need for me to write it because every single person who reads it will understand – it makes us feel sick with anxiety or overwhelmed with anger or at its worst, cynicism.

There’s a reason I don’t write much about UK politics.  The fact is there are no easy answers because we are living in a time of what Thomas Kuhn called ‘paradigm shift’. Anyone who claims to know what life will be like in 2050 is almost by definition a charlatan. It feels as if the ship has sunk already, and we’re in the water arguing about which lifebelt to grab hold of and which of our fellow passengers knows how to pilot the lifeboats, now the crew are all drunk after raiding the stores.

Do you remember the political fashion, so beloved by New Labour, of ‘evidence based policies’?  Loved, that is, until the evidence started to show that things were going to hell in a handcart because the patient was fundamentally sick, and a few paid ads saying that ‘everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ was not selling well in the derelict mining towns of the North East. This is the most terrible and heart wrenching mess and it’s all connected in a rat’s nest of trans-national  greed.

However we have the opportunity in the UK this week to turn protests into policy. Saving the earth from climate catastrophe begins with challenging an extractive economy that destroys the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we need to eat. It throws people across the world into slavery and poverty in the name of international trade, and blithely dismisses mass extinctions – including even the human race. When I walk around the grand Georgian crescents of Bath, built on slave money, and see the same people in power, I know that nothing’s changed, and I know that unless we seize the opportunity nothing will change.

There is no area of our lives that hasn’t been disfigured by so-called austerity, whether it’s health care, pensions, social care, education, cultural development, employment protection, environmental policy, transport – you name it.  So I’m voting for change, real change. I want to be able to teach my grandchildren their plants and butterflies in the knowledge that they’ll still be there when they’re my age. I want our sons to move out of squalid rentals into properly built houses and I want them to feel secure in their work without facing arbitrary contract changes. Selfishly, I’d like for us to be able to look to a future in old age without fear, and to walk down the street and hear ten languages spoken and a dozen cultures celebrated openly.  I’d like to be able to write about the allotment without the lurking fear that the council will sell the land off to another property developer, and if that meant paying a few quid more in tax I’d be happy to oblige as long as the offshore muggers paid theirs too. 

There isn’t an option out there to allow us to ignore the climate catastrophe in the hope of building some new technology to purge our sins and let us carry on as before. Our electoral system is rigged against us in the name of stability – i.e. more hardship – and so this coming Thursday is possibly the only opportunity we’ll have to vote for change; paradigm change, and in the US – your chance will come next year. We already know they’re scared, from the tide of promoted lies that flood like effluent into our minds every day.

I had a radio producer once whose recorded message said “you know what to do, so do it!” Let’s do it then.

 

Dyrham Park – which picture?

 

Looking west from Dyrham Park on the Cotswold escarpment towards Wales

I first climbed over the wall of Dyrham Park as a trespasser – about sixty years ago. I think the Blathwayt family or their descendants had long since gone and the place had been sold on to the Ministry of Works.  It was in a bad way, that’s for sure, and I’ve never quite lost the sense of not belonging there.  As a teenager I thought it was one of the most beautiful green spaces I’d ever seen – although I never dared approach the house for fear of being caught and getting into trouble.  I could cycle there in an hour and hide my bike in the bushes before I climbed over the wall, and I could see the whole of my life in a landscape from the top of the escarpment, right at the end of the Cotswolds. .

Sometimes I would  lie there in the grass, just watching the clouds pass over – it was hard to find any peace and solitude at home as a teenager.  Once the park passed into the hands of the National Trust it got easier and Madame and me have even ridden horses in the grounds, galloping across the wide open spaces a few times, but I was never going to make a confident rider.  Nowadays we’re National Trust members and so we can wave our cards and walk freely in the grounds knowing that no-one is going to ask us what we’re up to.

IMG_20191110_125434I’ve never been inside the house.  It’s the open spaces, the deer, Whitefield meadow in July, the autumn fungi the gardens and an occcasion tea and cheese scone in the cafe that we go for.  More often than not we take the long walk around the boundary, just passing by the house and the gift shop – always crowded.  Today the car parks were packed with hundreds of cars and yet by taking our favourite route we hardly saw a soul for most of the time. There wasn’t much to see in the wildflower department except for some encouraging signs of new leaves at the edges of Whitefield meadow and a solitary oxeye daisy.  The gardens were a different matter and the gardeners should be proud of the colour and variety they’ve achieved in November.

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These extraordinary Clerodendrum trichotomum – harlequin glorybower or peanut butter tree – are both exotic and thoroughly odd. Elsewhere in the formal gardens there is masses of colour, with the dogwoods just approaching their best. I’ve never been much of an enthusiast for very formal gardens, I’m more of a cottage garden, Gertrude Jekyll sort of fan but all the same we wandered around, I took a few photos and wished that someone would start a medicinal herb garden there – it would be yet another touch of authenticity for a house soaked in history.  So I had history on my mind as we wandered to the end of the formal garden, thinking about Culpeper whose 1653 herbal would have been a staple around the time the house was being restored betwen 1692 and 1704 . It was all very romantic until we turned around.MVIMG_20191110_130608

Looking back towards the house it’s impossible not to be impressed at the beautiful baroque building while being simultaeously appalled at the source of the wealth that built it. William Blathwayt made his fortune as an MP and civil servant administering the slave plantations of America. In fact I wonder how much of Bath was built on the backs of numberless slaves.  The Beckford Tower, the Georgian crescents, the Sidney Gardens.  Hugely important architecturally and historically; generating millions in revenue from tourism every year and yet fatally compromised for me by the suffering that made them possible.  And that’s why I’ve never been inside the house, because all that architectural beauty came at a price. The beauty and ecological richness of the surrounding parkland is still uplifting even as the environment is under threat but it never truly belonged to us.

“There’s no such thing as clean money” I used to say glibly to anyone who criticised St Mary Redcliffe where I worked,  for being built on slave money. I was wrong. The issue as to whether slavery was evil is settled, but the issue of how we live with its fruits is not. British taxpayers didn’t finish paying off the debt incurred by compensating slave owners for the loss of their “property” until four years ago. Yes four years ago. It’s Remembrance Sunday today.  Remembering is, or ought to be, more than a sentimental costume drama.  Remembering is radical, dangerous and challenging, it makes demands on us.  Even a simple walk on a sunny day can get swept into its vortex.