Tag: St David's

An evening benediction after the storm

We were in the middle of making up the bed in the campervan when the whole interior was suddenly suffused with golden light after a stubbornly grey day. After ten more minutes of sunset it was dark; the wind finally gave way and the leaky windows stopped singing.

It’s not just us. We stand at the edge of the campsite and see doors and tents opening everywhere as shadowy dusk-darkened campers take photographs they may never look at again. The feeble flash of the phone cameras is an ironic commentary on our hubristic relationship with nature. It’s a scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” enacted every time the sky clears as night falls. We wonder whether the Green Ray will momentarily flash across the sea but it never does and it doesn’t matter, because if it did, every sunset afterwards would feel like a disappointment. So we stand there like penitents at the edge of the land, waiting for a blessing ; a sign that all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

“Isn’t that just so beautiful” we murmur without quite understanding how the earth seems to stand still at these moments which, strictly speaking, are the moments of extreme dynamism when day gives way to night and we, in our exact place and time, experience the loss of the sun with nothing more than faith and hope to keep us safe through the night. Of course we rarely reflect on this but turn to go back indoors and open another bottle, but perhaps a holiday – there’s a clue in the name – is the time when time is made for wonder.

When we are at the far western edge; in Cornwall,in Pembrokeshire and on the Lleyn peninsula, we see the sun setting over the sea. The last word of each day, you might say, is emptiness and silence with no human structure or invention intruding. The setting sun is silent but strangely the Moon always seems to me to have an ethereal sound trailing behind her. The sunsets here unite the elements of earth, air, fire and water which, in the West, are the constituents of life itself. The Taoists add wood and metal and take away air but that seems to me to spring from another, equally valid conception of our place in the world in which we are makers. What defines us as human is not so much thinking as detached observers of what the Taoists call the Ten Thousand Things; but our capacity as makers. Wood; Fire: Earth; Metal and Water – the elements that lie at the heart of the forge, the pottery, the farm and the building.

Air, though, as the medium of sound, has to fall still for there to be silence. St Davids Cathedral, in the absence of the crowds, is one of the most silent places I know save for the Jackdaws whose chatter almost enhances the absence of sound. Early in the morning and late in the evening the Cathedral sits in a protected valley – out of sight of seaborn raiders – so deep that uniquely, from my limited experience, the passer-by looks down on the roof and tower; so the sounds of ice cream queues, the pasty and souvenir shops and the constant flow of buses, coaches and minibuses barely intrude. The silence seeps into your bones and it’s good. The silence searches your inmost being and occasionally – if you wait long enough and quietly enough – will even speak; say something important. You needn’t even go into the building, in fact it may me more of a distraction to go through the great wooden door and be dazzled by the work of human hands. Any old seat outside in the sun or the wind and rain will do but it’s fine to wait for a sunny day because that makes it easier to wait.

And if you find, like me, that hordes of people are a bit off putting, try St Non’s Well about a mile’s walk away and the traditional birthplace of St David, but perhaps more importantly a place to take off your walking boots and bathe your tired feet in the cool water. The well itself is almost invisible to coastal path walkers with their eyes and hearts set on a personal best target, so you can sit there in silence for ages without being disturbed. Those that do see you usually hurry away in case you’re a threat to civilized human life!

That St David’s is a holy place is without doubt; but I doubt whether any religion has more than squatters’ rights to its benedictions.

Restharrow time

I guess that the harrowing of a field, even with a team of horses, would come to a halt when the tines dug into a mat of this plant. We’ve seen it before but always near the coast; I think the last time was in Portscatho in Cornwall but that was before my phone camera days – now my Pixel 6a does it all + lat & long which with a bit of fiddling yields a National Grid reference and a searchable database as well.

But I also love the name, because resting and harrowing have such wide fields of reference and the plant name Restharrow conjures up a ploughman calling his team back by name with a loud whooooa and pondering his next move. Wood engravings by Thomas Bewick, paintings by Samuel Palmer and the writing of George Ewart Evans come to mind and I’m plunged into rural history by a small but very pretty plant and a name with a cloud of meanings.

These words, the ones that trail clouds of meanings are useful but also tricky. On Friday night I was sleepless for hours. A southwesterly gale was blowing; rocking the campervan and soughing noisily through the leaky windows and I caught sight of the moon through a small gap at the top of the blind. But the moon wasn’t about to lend herself to any of the usual associations. For a start she was pale golden yellow rather than silvery and her usual progress across the sky seemed – well – vagrant, furtive under interrogation by my sleepless mind. Is it even possible to imagine a vagrant moon, stealing across the sky over Ramsey Sound with a haul of sunshine from somewhere always beyond the western horizon and then sinking quietly behind the clouds, or behind the brightening sky, in the dawn?

I lay awake for a while more and had one of our nocturnal chats with Madame, then fell asleep eventually attempting to disambiguate the highly ambiguous Male-ferns we’d found and photographed. It’s like counting sheep without ever arriving at a conclusion and sleep came as a relief

I think I must be addicted to the west; to sunsets and South Westerly storms and to the sunny days that always feel like a gift rather than a right. Here we watch the fierce tides flow through Ramsey Sound, intermittently covering and revealing the Bitches, a dreadful reef to any unwary sailor or canoeist – not that it ever seems to deter them. During the daytime the peace is rent by the ribs which offer so-called wildlife tours around the island but which seem to be extreme water adventures in anything but name, probably terrifying the wits out of any seals unfortunate enough to have hauled up on an inaccessible beach. I really cannot imagine any less viable way of seeing wildlife than travelling in a (f) bucking rib at 30 mph.

The gale hasn’t let up for days, but we get intermittent spells of sunshine and it’s been good for plant hunting and then cataloguing in the stormy intervals. That’s a good holiday – arriving with a suitcase full of worthy books, encountering the mental equivalent of a clump of Restharrow and being forced to slow down or take a break.

After a drought we shouldn’t complain – but secretly we do

The view through the windscreen when we woke up today

We know exactly where they are – Ramsey Island, St David’s Head and the dragon backed hills beyond, but they’re invisible; crouched under a blanket of cloud and rain. The van shudders and rocks now and again in the blustery wind and it seems that everyone else has left the campsite. The big group of young people left, bedraggled, this morning. They tried their very best to party last night, circling their cars like covered wagons in the mist. The music started quietly and worked to a climax as one of the lads demonstrated his car’s special trick of flashing the headlights to the rhythm- but the light show only lasted ten minutes at most and the music soon died down to the point where we could hear them talking quietly. I was sad for them because there was no heartbreakingly beautiful sunset to watch and it was cold, damp and hostile to youthful dreams that so often come apart in the cold light of reality. Friendships and relationships strong, fragile or merely desired were untouched by lightning bolts and revelations and the lecking ground that the boys had created was more often deserted by the girls who preferred their own company. I remember it all so well; the temptation to settle for less and let go of the dreams.

Or maybe that’s all just part of my personal psychogeography – the sadness I sense seeping from shores and strandlines, especially out of season. Maybe it’s to do with the sound of the waves which taunt us and say – “no; ‘eternal’ is the wrong word. Times and seasons, rise and fall, spring and neap – this is what ‘forever’ really feels like. Eternity is a suburban religious concept born out of the fear of change“.

A confession

Anyway, there are bigger fish to fry this holiday, well botanical fish anyway, because in an email exchange with the local Vice County Recorder a couple of years ago – (they’re the first line volunteers who make sure that beginners and idiots like me don’t submit wrongly identified records) – he verified a record I’d sent and then wished me well; suggesting that I might have a look for three modestly unusual plants, growing right next to the campsite. I never properly thanked him for his encouragement because I knew that I’d committed a grave sin out of sheer ignorance. We were in a hurry to catch the bus back to the campsite and I spotted something I’d never seen before and carelessly ripped a lump away so I could identify it later. This is the shadow sin to the more normal one of thinking that every plant I don’t recognise must be vanishingly rare. Anyway, after a bit of a struggle I managed to photograph the bit of the plant I’d taken and key it out and – to my great embarrassment – it really was very unusual. Only one previous record of it growing wild in St Davids city. The karmic punishment for this is that every time we go to the supermarket to stock up I search the wall fiercely in search of survivors and cry inwardly “out damned spot.” If that kindly VC Recorder ever reads this story – I’m truly sorry and I’ve never removed so much as a leaf since that day. I just take photos of all the parts of the plants that clinch the identity.

So these three plants, then – Wormwood, Dwarf Mallow and Corn Parsley – well the Wormwood seems just the ticket for an act of atonement if I can find it, but I’ll excuse myself the gall. Corn Parsley is one of those declining plants that once thrived in the different world that we’ve hubristically destroyed and Dwarf Mallow will be a doddle to identify if I can but find it. I shall send the three records as compensation, wash my feet in St Non’s Well and then do a jig.

Every time we come here I’m struck by how very different the mix of plants is. For the first few days I feel utterly incompetent until I get my eye in. Climate, geology, wind, rain and salt shape the coastal plant life in a unique way and I’m always awestruck by nature’s capacity to adapt and change. By the way, I’m well aware that calling nature some kind of thing is a kind of category error. The other day I photographed a Ribwort Plantain on the allotment site. It just shouted at me – “Look at me; I’m different!”

Would it be impolite to say to the plant – “My goodness, those are the longest flower stalks I’ve ever seen on a Plantain!” – Again I sent the photo off to the North Somerset Vice County Recorder and she was quite sure it was both unusual but also no more than a genetic variation; an intellectual bridge too far for me. The thought that plants and other organisms merrily go through life as if they were at a car boot sale picking up bits of DNA that – as my grandfather would say – “might come in useful one day”. I can imagine Madame balking at me trying to smuggle an electron scanning microscope on to the van – and as for DNA I discovered that hand DNA scanning devices really exist at fabulous expense so I’m afraid it’s back to the Book of Stace for me.

So here we are in West Wales but strangely my mobile phone thinks for the purposes of weather reports we’re in County Wexford in Ireland. I’m hoping that doesn’t mean they’re imposing roaming charges on the data SIM. It’s raining almost continually after weeks of punishing sunshine so we’re in no position to grumble, but naturally we lament the fact that after all the watering and nurturing of our infant crops; and after assisting with watering on eight other allotments whose owners were sunbathing languidly on holiday; and after packing almost no cold-weather clothes we’re confined to the campervan; and I’m writing rather than pottering around in the sunshine. “Never mind” – we say “Life’s an ever flowing well of interesting events”, and it’s true but as I wrote earlier in this post, it sometimes refuses to live up to our expectations.

Sunset – last September

Advice for bloggers. There’s always the shop that sells expensive notebooks and watercolour paint

Sunset, looking west across the northern tip of Ramsey Island

That’s certainly true in Bath where you can easily spend over £100 on a posh notebook and fountain pen and release your inner Jane Austen during the length of a single rainy day.

I write – as ever – of myself; and my inner Jane Austen who remains captive in spite of the deskloads of notepaper and must-have pens which I’ve bought over the years to no effect at all. Even a set of six French manufactured coloured inks failed to remove the large stone rolled in front of the creative sepulchre.

For a while I convinced myself that it was the sheer expense of these accessories that was holding me back and so I started writing on torn up sheets of absorbent lining paper. There you go! we all have our little rituals which – although they have no impact at all on what we write – are strangely enabling of the act itself. John Masefield apparently liked to write with a box of rotting apples under his chair and Stanley Spencer memorably enjoyed the smell of human poo which seemed to get his creative juices going. Not for me, thanks. The seaside, with its smells of tar, salt and suntan lotion usually does it for me but these days I eschew all the tics of the past and write on my Chromebook wherever I happen to be.

For ten years I taught creative writing in the Welsh Valleys and in a notorious outer urban fringe estate, and it was there I learned that absolutely anyone can write. If there’s a problem it doesn’t lay with the (worker) writers but with the education system and the publishing business that sets the parameters of what we’re allowed to experience, think or express in writing. Of course the greatest enemy of many writers is self-doubt, but again this has its good side. Words don’t often come easily and it’s no bad thing to hesitate before putting your turds of wisdom before the public at large.

My own approach to writing was developed by having to meet deadlines. When you’ve got a deadline – even a self imposed one – you can forget all the faff and self delusion about waiting to feel the creative flow before committing. Sit down, turn on the laptop, write something and as it emerges you can correct, revise and edit as you go along. Oh and although it’s a good idea to have some thoughts on your potential audience, don’t let that be a straightjacket. In a blog format like this you can write for more than one audience and hope that some readers will like a bit of green spirituality as well as gardening tips. Never be afraid of pissing your followers off by failing to pander to their prejudices. You win some. And don’t pay too much attention to blogging advice on how to monetize your pages or get more hits. If you make the audience king you’ll land up being a servant.

For years I’ve honed my technique to deliver around a thousand words of reasonably stimulating, challenging ideas, backed up by experience and a lot of hard reading. What I haven’t learned is the very different skill set of gathering and editing those ten minute pieces into a larger format. Developing the significant themes into theses requires a larger view and a longer focus than I’m used to working with.

So we’re taking a two week post-harvest break in the campervan near St Davids, overlooking Ramsey Sound, and with a weather forecast that only differs in the predicted intensity of the rain for the next fourteen days. What could be better than repurposing some of that reading time to try out a larger format – say 10,000 words long? Well, coincidentally I packed Robert Graves’ “The White Goddess” to re-read, and this morning I made a start on it. Apart from his poetry and the book I have a single point of contact with him because I took the funeral service for a woman in his Majorcan circle who typed up some of the draft copies of the “White Goddess”. By the time I got to meet her she was near to death and not going gentle into that good night. Not that she ever spoke, but she was passing restlessly into unconsciousness. I sat with her daughter as her mother lay dying and asked the obvious question – “Why don’t you read her some poetry?” She was aghast at the very thought. Her mother – who sounded like a real martinet had always hated and criticised the way that her daughter read poetry aloud. Cue for a lifetime of repressed longing for someone, anyone, to offer any small praise.

As I started to read the book again I couldn’t get that picture out of my mind. Graves comes across as a slightly paranoid, obsessive old monster; absolutely determined to have his say and drive his point home like a stake through the heart. It’s my way or the highway. Anyway I soldiered on through the introduction and eventually found an example of an old Welsh poetic form called Cynghanedd that Graves had written to illustrate what he calls a “burdensome obsession”. I thought it was an absolutely wonderful use of words:

Billet spied,

Bolt sped.

Across fields

Crows fled,

Aloft, wounded

Left one dead

Robert Graves in a footnote in “The White Goddess”

That’s a wonderful encouragement to be bold with words; but the real takeaway point is that in his eagerness to press home every single obsessive point by wrestling it into the ground, Graves managed to write what even he thought was a difficult book that would be completely unintelligible to the “stupid and silly” people who would never be able to understand – because they weren’t proper poets. That should be a warning to anyone attempting to write in longer forms. Good writing flows like a river not a stream with prostate problems, and being right will in no way protect us from being bad.