Tag: urban wildlife

What happens when the lights go out?

Royal Crescent in a rare peaceful moment

To be honest – apart from the tourist guides – this is not a typical moment in Georgian Bath; or at least not during daylight hours. Half a mile East and you might imagine you’re in Oxford street, London; the same distance to the north and south would see you at the end of the Cotswolds or across the river, deep fingers of countryside and Georgiana separated by large estates of social housing. This particular place, Royal Crescent – and no-one can deny its grace and beauty – is normally crowded with tourists.

We live in a similarly divided cultural world. Beggars and Big Issue sellers rub shoulders with tourists whilst we locals practice arcane navigations to cross the tides of tourists and traverse the city. We hardly know who we are. Anyone who comes here probably has a better idea of their true identity, whether it be Roman legionnaire or Regency Buck; Hello magazine bride-to-be or Emma Woodhouse practicing lip pursing in case they meet someone they fancy. We have as much cultural stability as a seaside resort in August. On Friday afternoons the pavements tremble to the sounds of wheelie suitcases – we call it the Barcelona rumble, and on Sunday afternoons they depart. Mondays are quieter. Speed limits are for the little people who change the sheets, flip burgers on minimum wage and pick up the litter. Yet we locals only have to walk a few hundred yards and pick the right time to find peace. You could throw a stick from Royal Crescent as far as three allotment sites, and walk in ten minutes down Cow Lane – whose sign has been stolen by a Jane Austen trophy hunter – to Victoria park and the Botanical Gardens. And whilst the Kennet and Avon canal towpath is busy for the first mile eastwards from the bus station, walking west along the riverside walk, apart from commuting cyclists and runners. you’ll have abundant time and space to check out the local weeds: well at least I do, and many of them turn out to be gratifyingly rare!

One of the unique joys of Bath is the fact that you can stand almost anywhere and see the countryside up on the surrounding hills. Notwithstanding the worst efforts of the riverside property developers, once you climb upwards by about 75 feet you can look across the grim tenements of the future into North Somerset, Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire. From the riverside the developments look more like bonded warehouses; uniformly dull and bleak and battered by their own architectural whirlwinds.

So let’s turn our attention to the parts of the city centre where the wild has infiltrated, We have otters and even beavers in the river now. Herons, sparrowhawks, peregrines, tawny owls, swifts, swallows, housemartins and the whole gamut of garden birds – although you might have to walk a way to find sparrows and starlings which are scarce. In early summer you can see dace sparkling in the river, and in some of the tributary streams there are signal crayfish which have displaced the locals. On our allotment we have even filmed deer, but more commonly it’s squirrels, badgers, foxes, cats and rats; lots of rats.

Mostly we don’t see the night visitors but we have a trail cam running continuously and we also find lots of characteristic signs of their presence. Last night we got an incredibly lucky shot of one of our resident foxes emerging from behind the polytunnel with a large rat in its mouth. We’ve had three traps set in the same run for two weeks now and never got a sniff of a rat, but the fox knows where they are and can crouch silently until a warm takeaway supper comes along. We have read about foxes predating on rats but this hard evidence was really exciting. Other than the fox, the only other taker for the peanut butter bait was a badger who shook and bashed one of the heavy duty box traps until it sprang shut without yielding the peanut. This almost redeems the foxes from their countryside capers – raiding our chickens when we lived on Severnside.

Aside from mammals, we have dragonflies, damselflies, ivy bees, hoverflies, wasps, spiders, beetles and butterflies all sharing the plot with us and this year we’ll be trapping moths to add to our knowledge of the night shift. You’d never believe the diversity of our wildlife if your only experience of Bath was gained from a weekend shopping expedition on Milsom Street. Our allotment is in the middle of the city and yet we probably have more wild diversity than a chemical drenched arable field in the countryside. You just have to learn to be very quiet and watch.

Here’s a video link of fox v rat- it’s too big to attach here but I hope you enjoy it. Nature red in tooth and claw!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Kudr5fY5JMB89RXz7

Thanks for the memory – it’s pretty wild out there!

The neglected pavement level view outside our flat

It was the Biting Stonecrop – Sedum acre – in flower, that caught my eye first; that’s the very bright green plant with thickened drought proof leaves and yellow flowers in the centre of the picture. We haven’t seen it there before. But when I looked at it on the larger screen at home I saw the Mexican Fleabane; some Canadian Fleabane gathering strength in the background; some unidentifiable out of focus moss at the bottom and above it the most lovely slime mould – which rarely gets this big on an urban pavement and has the gift of moving very very slowly from place to place. We had some on the fire escape once that took a leisurely six months to descend the steps and set up home on a road less trampled by human feet.

On the wall below the raised pavement we’ve got Wall Rue, a fern; Herb Robert, a geranium; then in a narrow crack at the base there’s Sowthistle, Nipplewort, Dandelion (of course) and half a dozen others, surviving historic dowsings with Glyphosate which was replaced by salt crystals and then the road sweeper’s scraper. Around and about the car park (ex builders’ yard), there are over forty species of wildflower – many of them tiny versions of their grander selves which live in less inhospitable environments. It’s often hands and knees botany in these urban settings.

When we talk about nature and wildflowers, insects and mammals our default setting is somewhere green and pleasant; somewhere we usually have to drive miles to get to, armed with expensive kit; GPS units, field guides and binoculars. However, if you were to ask me where you could see otters in Bath, I’d have to say under Sainsbury’s bridge. Red Kite? south of the river. Buzzards – anywhere if you keep your eyes peeled. Peregrine falcons? nesting on the spire of St John’s Church.

The shocking truth is that if you love the wild – and by that I mean the natural world that’s rather the bit neglected by humans than the exhausted and overmanaged bit that we call countryside, then aside from National Trust land, nature reserves and SSSI’s you’re more likely to be able to feast on it in the city these days.

Yesterday we walked over to Widcombe to buy some decent sausages. Our practice is to eat less meat but of better welfare standards and quality. We took the riverside path as usual, and in the process we passed the Bath Quays site which is very slowly taking shape. In the first year either the architects or the local council had specified wildflower borders in the flood control areas. They lasted for a single year, but because they were probably an imported seed mixture an incongruous jumble of flowers that would never normally be seen together in the wild; they died back and were replaced by the usual thugs and vagabonds which just loved the rich imported soil brought in from elsewhere. Ironically, behind the now unimpressive borders was the blighted site of phase two, a demolished car park. This thin, impoverished and fenced off building site is now blessed by a magnificent display of the genuinely wild. My favourite, the Vipers Bugloss has been shuffling from patch to patch as the park area has been “improved” and has now colonized and spread across quite a large area, but as we walked along the 200 metre boundary I gave up counting after I reached 20 species. There was Mugwort; two kinds of Sow thistle, creeping buttercup, Black Medick, Hedge Mustard, Wall Barley, Poppy, Rye grass, False Oat grass, Ragwort, Mallow and Oxeye daisy; and two or three Geranium species, Docks and Sorrels. There were Spear thistles and Creeping thistles and It was all quite overwhelming and I was prompted to wonder whether I should be using a voice recorder and transcription app on my phone to record the sheer variety. The heartbreaking truth is that these will all disappear under a blanket of flats, offices and retail units, leaving a perfect, manicured and expensive view of our grossly polluted river .

So here are some photos of the treasures that live in the most impoverished and sometimes squalid places beneath our feet. We should really value them much more than we do.

Vipers Bugloss.

Rewilding the pavement

North Somerset is a very wildlife rich county. We can easily walk to half a dozen outstandingly diverse habitats which – because we have both a river and a canal – reach like green fingers to the centre of the city. Otters are often seen within a quarter of a mile of our flat, and in summer we can lean over the riverside and see Dace swimming in the shallows. It’s a joy. The tourist guide writers love to swoon over the honey coloured stone at sunset and we not only have parks but also a botanical garden, riverside walks and a cycle path linking us with Bristol and into the National Network that could take you to London on a bike or in a kayak. I don’t want to oversell the beauties because we’re already stuffed with tourists but living in a beautiful city with a local authority which has declared the environmental emergency feels like a step in the right direction.

This year – finally – the City Council took the brave decision to stop spraying our streets and pavements with Glyphosate. The policy seems to have met with less resistance than the clean air zone – or CAZ -which has provoked venomous opposition from those who think parking their SUV’s outside on the pavement next to their favourite shop is some kind of human right. The pollution here has not only been persistent, it’s been illegal and the Council have struggled to impose a policy that would actually work. Exempting all private cars including the Range Rovers and Discoveries was a sop to the most vocal opponents but the policy is working – although much more slowly than it might have done. The providential closure of a major HGV route through the centre of Bath during bridge repairs may have had a lot to do with the results so far.

The routine spraying of pavements was a different issue. Through traffic has been a problem for more than fifty years, but the removal of any plants from the pavements seems to be a hangover from another age; an age in which weeds were treated as an enemy that needed to be vanquished every year – as if the pavements were a war zone. The consequences of weeds were never clearly specified but unknown horrors such as pensioners tripping over were gravely hinted at. In truth, generations of municipal grounds people (I was one of them) were raised within the ancient hostilities and killing weeds gave a kind of atavistic pleasure.

So this is the first year of the new policy and we’re just beginning to see the results. Truth to tell, Glyphosate is a rubbish weedkiller in any case because more and more so-called weeds are developing resistance to it. The plants just died back and played possum for a month or two and then sprang into new life as if nothing had happened. The consequences for the rest of us were less benign, and rivers and their associated water tables have been saturated with poison which has been finding its way into our water supplies and into us. Bayer/Monsanto will claim it’s all a myth but then – they would, wouldn’t they?

The photos at the top could not have been taken on the same day and month in any year within the last decades because by now they would have gone. So it’s a complete joy to report all of these modest beauties growing within fifteen paces of our front door. There are many more, but the street is lined with Mexican Fleabane – that’s the pretty daisy looking plant. Then there’s Canadian Fleabane growing rapidly, Ivy Leaved Toadflax, Broad Leaved Plantain, Cat’s Ear, Smooth Sows’ Ear, Prickly Sows’ Ear, Dandelion, Wall Lettuce, Nipplewort, and Pineapple Weed. There’s Annual Meadow Grass and Wall Barley. At the back there’s Herb Robert, Great Lettuce and many other species. I suppose it was a matter of mindset rather than moral deficiency that kept us killing them off every year – culture eats strategy for breakfast after all and in time, I hope, more and more people will come to appreciate these miniature nature reserves on our doorsteps – after all it’s faintly miraculous that anything can survive in this hot, dry, waterless and polluted hostile environment. It’s a tribute to the persistence and adaptability of nature that these ancient residents and relative newcomers can emerge, seemingly from nowhere, miles from their natural habitats in fields and hedgerows.

If the Potwell Inn had a field it would look like this.

Sadly our backyard is shared with twenty cars. For many decades it was a builders yard and then when the block was built it was levelled and covered in tarmac but – never maintained – it now sustains a small community of absolute diehard plants who make a scant living on the thin accumulated dirt. They change from time to time, and even move around – one patch of slime mould has retreated down the concrete steps and taken up residence next to a clump of Herb Robert which can live on fresh air it seems. You might curl your lip at a blob of gelatinous olive green goo; but I’ve seen reports that it’s capable of being extremely purposeful and has some efficiency at negotiating mazes.

I did once make a list of species and it was in the high twenties; but it seems to change every year. This year we’ve got a splendid collection of Great Lettuce along with its cousin Wall Lettuce. They won’t win any beauty prizes but they’re brilliant for practicing your botanical skills because getting a proper ID demands a good deal of close attention to detail.

The smaller cousin, Wall Lettuce, is doing exactly what it says on the tin and is growing in a narrow crack between the ground and the wall.

However, none of this is going to stimulate much more than a forensic interest in an urban specialist. The fact is – even to my friendly eye – they look a lot like weeds. The only wonder is in the fact that these ugly sisters are related to the lettuces we grow on the allotment. In fact the Latin name of the Great Lettuce –Lactuca Virosa – suggests some kind of toxic properties – maybe they’re soporific? who knows. That’s an experiment I’ll leave to someone else.

Anyway, the real excitement this week came from a visit to Dyrham Park’s White Field – in the photograph at the top. Untouched by modern agrichemicals or ploughing it’s the kind of wildflower meadow that once existed almost everywhere. It was our first visit for three years after Covid rampaged across the country. The field is cut for hay at the end of the month – I bet it smells heavenly – and if I use the word awesome I mean it precisely in a way that trespasses into the territory of the spiritual. Our main target was the Bee Orchid, but sadly we didn’t find any. However within fifty yards of walking into the field we found Early Purple and Pyramidal Orchids – they were everywhere. I’ll put some photos below this – I’ve been avoiding using Latin names because Madame reproached me for rehearsing them as we walked through the dense flowers. I love the English plant names for their poetry and history but I’m afraid Latin is the way to go if you’re trying to ID something. I’ve got a book on English plant names by Geoffrey Grigson and when you look at the number of plants that share the same English name you soon realize that wildflower lovers from two adjoining counties might use the same name for totally different plants.

So among the plants we soon noticed was one known in English as Jack go to bed at noon, or Goatbeard. Huge downy heads resembling Dandelions but filmier and even more lovely. Down in the hands and knees zone were Yellow Rattle and Common Broomrape; Purple and White Clovers, Birdsfoot and all the usual suspects. Towering above were drifts of Smooth Hawksbeard and Oxeye Daisies with the seedheads of Ribwort Plantain, Sheep’s Sorrel and Cocksfoot grass. It was a joy to see them bending in waves against the strong wind which was limiting the activities of butterflies. You can often find Marbled Whites there. It’s a shame that despite the nearby car park being almost full, we were completely alone except for a solitary dog walker. It seems that most nature lovers prefer their wildlife mindfulness moments on the telly. Anyway; the photographs convey – to me at least – far more than any words could do.

Something’s broken and it’s not just the weather

Common red soldier beetle – AKA hogweed bonking beetle!

The more times we set the trail cam, the smaller any sense of ownership or control we feel we have over the allotment. Last night the weather finally broke. We could feel it coming during the day as the temperature fell very slowly and an easterly breeze picked up. We spent the morning feeding the tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, squashes and courgettes; watered anything that was languishing in the heat and then sowed seeds for the autumn and winter. The weather front came up gradually and the sky filled with clouds – not the immense thunder clouds we’d half expected – but low and dense. Madame has a nose for the smell of rain on the way – it’s called petrichor – the smell, not her nose! -but there was nothing there. After we’d driven posts and ties in to support the taller plants in case of strong winds, we cleared up; ate our breakfast at lunchtime and then went on our accustomed walk eastwards along the river and back along the canal. The evening was still stifling, even with all our windows opened wide. Bath sits in a basin, surrounded by hills and in a prolonged period of high pressure the air gets more and more fetid. The much publicised clean air zone has reduced traffic by only one percent but repairs to the Cleveland bridge have diverted even more traffic through our neighbourhood so it’s worse than ever.

Consequently we’ve slept badly during the heatwave and last night there was the added distraction of imminent thunderstorms which we couldn’t wait to welcome – preferably without too much destructive power but plentiful rain to soak the earth and refill the water butts. We were up every hour during the night, peering through the shutters – our gardening lives are dominated by the weather – and around two in the morning we heard the first sounds of thunder some miles away; grumbling like a convoy of heavy lorries. At four the lightning came close and the rain began. With the wind in the northeast a cool draught woke us up again and we watched the rain gratefully through the window.

The rain didn’t last nearly long enough but at six I gave up and made tea and then kneaded a batch of sourdough bread for its second rise – which is when I decided to go up to the allotment to check for any casualties of the weather (there were none) and to extract and replace the SD card in the trail cam. It seems that we weren’t the only ones up and awake last night. There were video clips of a badger, a fox and later on, a ginger cat all out hunting on our plot. I love the way the fox hunts. He sits bolt upright and stock still with his ears almost flared; scoping the ground by slowly turning his head from side to side and rotating his ears independently. There were other clips of him coming and going along the paths so he spent some time on the plot. The badger hunts with his nose and the cat with all its senses primed. Fox and cat stalk their prey silently and then pounce, but it’s hard to imagine the badger doing anything of the kind. He’s a digger and a browser with a prodigious memory for the places he can find treats. Yesterday one of our human neighbours found a number of her bulb fennel plants dug up.

So how much sway do we actually hold on the allotment? Of course we can sow and tend our crops; but if we consider our work from a more detached perspective it’s clear that the major parameters, within which we garden, are largely beyond our control. Seasons; weather; pests; diseases, birds and larger animals are all part of the process, and if we try to interfere we often do more harm than good. Two days ago I found a dead rat on the patch. By the next day it was gone. The most likely culprit was the cat; but the remains could have been taken by either fox or badger after it had been feasted on by a multitude of flies and insects. Why tidy things up when that means depriving our neighbourly creatures of a meal? Wild gardening necessarily means stepping back from tidiness and control but it doesn’t follow that we have less food from the allotment. We expect to lose some crop, but that’s because the ground never belonged to us in the first place. It is we who borrow it from the teeming multitude of macro and micro life-forms who have been managing rather better without our help for countless thousands of years. The best we can hope to be is good tenants during our temporary lease of the land and so rather than just feeding ourselves we need to be mindful of the needs of all our neighbours. The thing about the earth is that when we treat it properly it brings abundance, but we are the first victims when we treat her carelessly and badly.

The trail cam just brings our larger neighbours to our attention. We’ve loved having so many bees, butterflies, hoverflies, dragon and damselflies as well as tadpoles and froglets in the pond. We do no more than provide a habitat for them and they pay us back tenfold by clearing up after us on the compost heaps, pollinating our plants and feasting on pests like greenfly and blackfly. To try to argue that these creatures lower the productivity of the allotment is crazy. The allotment produces abundance – more than enough to meet our need for food but also feeds our inner, spiritual needs as well; maintaining a huge community of which we are just one part. Even more significantly there’s evidence that the humble allotment is far more productive acre for acre, than many intensive farms; providing much more opportunity for engaging and creative labour. Farmers all over the country are going out of business, unable to make a profit. Local authorities, who used to be major holders of land for smallholdings, have sold off these resources but if they would lease new land from unprofitable farms it could be used to produce new allotments and smallholdings close to towns and cities that could produce good food locally and reduce food miles while improving biodiversity and creating many new jobs. Objections to this such a scheme can surely only be motivated by an ideological commitment to more chemicals, more false productivity and more growth.

The weather is a mess of our own making; the air we breathe is polluted by our addiction to oil, and we are sick from extremes of poverty and wealth; eating industrial junk; and stricken by loneliness and separation from nature. We’re governed by a bunch of clodhopping clowns with no vision and no plan except more of what’s killing us and it’s high time we pushed back and demanded something better. End of rant – but I hope you like the video clip.

The stars dispose but do not compel

It was Beth Chatto, whose motto – “right plant, right place” – came to mind as we walked past the Bath Quays development yesterday. Some years ago the river bank was reshaped into terraces in advance of new building on the north side of the river, The terraces were rather expensively covered with wildflower matting – coir impregnated with seeds, I imagine to honour the fashionable spirit of the wild. The earth; much disturbed and turned over by archaeologists and heavy machinery and then covered with topsoil yielded a single fine crop of wildflowers last seen growing together on a film set before the thugs moved back and put the newcomers in their place. True, a few have survived but the dreams of the planners would surely have taken a dive if they ever came back to look at their creation. There used to be a building company in Swindon, from memory, ironically named “Bodgit and Scram” – you get the picture. Creative landscape designers are rarely confronted with the difference between glossy brochures and living earth.

Some of the plants, however, didn’t disappear; they just took a walk down the road and found somewhere more suited to their natural habitat. The Vipers Bugloss in the picture is one of the more attractive ones which, while not normally seen in this part of the world outside gardens, has set up a squatters’ camp alongside the road amongst the rubble and clutter of an earlier utopian dream.

If you want to make a nature reserve you can either buy some expensive land and spend shed loads of money on it or – as this little paradise suggests – put up a temporary fence around a bit of unloved and rubble filled earth awaiting “development” and go away for a couple of years. In this case the inevitable Buddleias came along, with bindweed and all the other early risers; and with them came butterflies – who’d have thought it? – and then some of the other escapees from the designed wild like yarrow and campions; some nice vetches, oxeye daisies, poppies and so forth.

It should (but probably won’t) remind us that just as you can’t create a community by building a community centre, so you can’t rewild the city centre with a coir mat and seeds from somewhere in Europe. Beth Chatto’s “right plant right place” applies as much to rewilding as it does to gardens and allotments. The Potwell Inn allotment has had many areas enriched by mountains of leaf mould, manure and compost. But the places where we’ve planted the lavenders and mediterranean herbs had to have their rich clay/loam topsoil removed and replaced with something more akin to stone soup to borrow a metaphor from the kitchen. And, of course the harsher environment suits them very well.

The “weeds” that were expensively doused in weedkiller back along the river walk are now recovering slowly, and happily the patch of greater celandine seems to have been missed altogether. Within a few weeks, I hope, the ragwort, herb Robert, nipplewort and dandelions will shake themselves and get back into the business of being wild in the city. Rewilding doesn’t so much require committees and designers as it needs nurturing what’s already found its place on the pavement. The real challenge is to teach more people to love weeds and nurture their vital role in the great scheme of things.

But that was last year!

Now we’re three weeks behind

With the prospect of a loosening of the lockdown tomorrow – which, to be honest, is a lousy idea – it would be lovely to pretend that we could get back to normal on the allotment. However, these photos taken in May last year prove beyond all reasonable doubt that this year we’re at least three weeks behind. Looking out across the green just now there’s not a sign of our elderflowers blossoming although the purple variety shown, from which we made the bottles also featured above, is at least in full leaf. The window boxes are waiting for the petunias to go in so they can be moved down to the flat, but even in the hotbed and the polytunnel the beetroots are nowhere near as well developed. Today we found the first tiny broad (fava) bean pods and we’re still at the carrot thinning stage. The asparagus bed is just grumbling into life like a teenager on a school morning, and we’ve had a couple of tasters but hardly a feed.

In other respects we’ve done well inside the tunnel, with salad greens, radishes, turnips, container potatoes looking well in their new position outside, and the ever patient tomatoes hardening off in pots; taller and healthier than they were last May. The slugs have been busy during this week of rain, and managed to fell all our dill seedlings and half of our sunflowers. What’s particularly infuriating is the way they climb up the plants and saw off the growing tip. The runner beans, planted out two days ago, were spared by leaving a sacrificial tray of failures to attract them away but we’ve been fighting a losing battle and today I ordered some nematode treatment which is expensive but marginally less so than losing crops. Even the aubergines, chillies and peppers have been locked down with us, clogging up the propagators and windows. Our first ever attempt at melons suffered a mere 25% germination rate and of the survivors there’s only one healthy looking plant but that could just as easily be lack of experience on our part.

A couple of weeks ago we were given an old freezer which has relieved our storage problems enormously, and so for the first time aside from eating inordinate amounts of freshly cooked rhubarb, we’ve been able to freeze enough to make jam later on when things calm down. There’s enough rhubarb on the whole allotment site to start a jam factory – it’s one of the few plants that it’s almost impossible to kill – along with horseradish of course! But some of the less experienced allotmenteers don’t seem to know that they should cut off the flowering spikes as soon as they appear, and keep pulling sticks regularly to preserve a supply of fresh and tender stalks. The old ones – the thickness of your arm are tough and full of oxalic acid.

The bird feeders have been a tremendous success, attracting great tits, blue tits and today a couple of coal tits that were quite unafraid of me standing quietly no more than three feet away. We’ve also had robins and magpies with blackbirds helping out on the path edges digging out slugs and snails. It’s difficult not to associate their arrival with the pond as well and our tadpoles are growing slowly although they must be being predated by something because the numbers have dropped significantly. So it’s not all bad news, and scanning the blogs today Madame said that everyone seems to be suffering from the cold and wet weather so the problem isn’t local.

To go to a theme I return to often, it’s not the bird rarities or the heaviest, tallest or fattest vegetables in the world, but the ordinary that animates us. Of course I wouldn’t shoo a willow tit or a goldcrest away, but I’m not the least bit disappointed if our allotment highlights are no better or worse than thousands of other equally ordinary people have, and a dandelion is a cheerful flower to have around when nothing much else is happening. In fact weeds are what most urban botanical apprentices like me cut our teeth on and the closer you look the more wonderful they seem to be. Dandelion seeds – when looked at through a low magnification microscope – are an absolute wonder!

Going back to the picture on the top left of the group; that’s the green I write about. It’s an incredibly popular spot for trysts, catch ups, picnics, getting drunk, kicking a ball around, dealing drugs, exercising dogs, once (memorably) dogging, (and behind every curtain in the square was a shameless pair of eyes!) tai chi, gymnastics and all the rich tapestry of city life. Recently we discovered that after installing the bases for a couple of seats on the green, the council were dissuaded from installing them after receiving a petition – signed (it is claimed) by 70 local residents. In a long life of community based work I’ve grown suspicious of being told the everyone is against an idea. Usually it amounts to a small but articulate and organised subset of the community. The alleged grounds for the objection were that seats might encourage antisocial behaviour – really? How on earth have we managed until now?

However, nature spared us a battle when a large tree was blown down during one of the many storms in early spring. Within a couple of weeks the brash was all sawn off and taken away as firewood by a rough sleeper who’s been living on the river bank for over a year. People soon congregated around the dead tree and used it as a seat but it was really in the wrong place. So one day someone dragged the trunk laboriously across the green to a new spot under the canopy of our largest tree. He spent two evenings attempting to use it as a springboard to climb the big tree and eventually succeeded in getting way up into the canopy, whereupon he lost interest and went away – probably to write a book about climbing trees. Now the fallen tree was in shadow under the big one so another group hauled it out into the sunshine where it’s been ever since. Children painted it with bright and cheerful graffiti and played on it and it’s hardly ever empty. This morning a couple of young women sat on it in the rain on a plastic bag and with an umbrella while they drank their coffee. Frank Lake – now hardly remembered but a pioneer of what he called “clinical theology” used a memorable phrase that perfectly describes the bureaucratic mind . He said “you can die from hardening of the oughteries!” My philosophy and ethics lecturer put it another way in his first lecture: “you can’t make an ought into an is”. Indeed you can’t but it doesn’t stop people in power from trying.

That tree ought to be a message of hope and a warning to anyone who thinks they have the right to dictate how communities use their spaces. The empty plinths are now used to protect the grass from barbeques and it’s a constant pleasure to see, and hear people playing games, getting together and enjoying life – even if it’s a little anarchic and occasionally gets out of hand.

– in the end what’s more antisocial?

Street life and street theatre is free; doesn’t need a policy statement or any funding; committee meetings and minutes, or risk assessments – and in the end what’s more antisocial? Is it a bit of noise and fun on the green? or is it warehousing all your fragile and vulnerable people in one place? (on the edge of the green), driving up rents and house prices through speculation? polluting the air we breathe with privately owned 3 litre diesel engined vanity vehicles? and putting a route for 45 tonne lorries through the middle of a densely populated but unfashionable part of town? oh and building nothing but old peoples’ homes and student flats because that’s where the money is? Answers on a postage stamp please!

Strictly between ourselves

I was slightly relieved when by brief few days of incomprehensible popularity ended. I like to think of the Potwell Inn as a fairly intimate sort of place, and when literally hundreds of readers suddenly flooded in I felt paralysed – having no idea why they were there and what they were expecting of me. This situation has happened a couple of times now, when (I imagine) someone with a big following likes a piece I’ve written and then links it to their blog. It’s all well and good, but I’ve no idea who these new readers are and – (whether or not it’s down to my history) – I feel a kind of pastoral responsibility to my regular readers that I can’t press into service when the bar is packed with people I’ve never met. I don’t know much about most of you but over a long period I know from your likes, for instance, which pieces are likely to be enjoyed by certain readers, even if I only know your website names. I know who prefers the gentle and lyrical pieces to the scabrous political ones; and who likes a bit of philosophy along with the cooking. I know I can always write about the allotment without causing offence, but not about killing rats. I still write about the darker issues because the Potwell Inn is about being human not being perfect. The environmental crisis is safer territory than the economic one. In fact as I write this I’m amazed at what a strong picture I have of my readers. It reminds me very much of choosing music back in the day when I was a parish priest. “Here’s one for Barri” – I’d think as I put something on the Sunday list.

So there we are, back to normal; slogging on through the mist and fog of Covid, weary of listening to politicians who don’t know the difference between an aspiration and a policy, and (in our case) steering well clear of the kind of TV that keeps us awake at night. We watch cookery programmes mostly, and once a week we watch “saving lives at sea”- (about the Royal National Lifeboat Institution if you’re not in the dis-UK) to remind us that the devil doesn’t always have the best tunes.

Anyway, I thought you might be interested in the continuing presence of brownish white foam in the River Avon. As I mentioned a few days ago it can only get there via the sewers and the perfume of detergent is so strong at Pulteney Bridge you might be forgiven for wondering if the water company was giving the river bed a bit of a clean up – you know it can get very grubby down there and so a couple of thousand gallons of Persil non bio might be a good thing. In a parallel dystopia. Personally I think we should put a notice on all our toilets, sinks and showers to remind us that when it leaves the house it doesn’t leave the earth!

The canal, on the other hand is both clean and quiet. The heron was back on his beat near Deep Lock today; keeping an eye on a couple of workmen who were removing bits of scrap iron (including a child’s bicycle) from the canal bed with a grappling hook and a big magnet. This heron has a number of alternative ways of feeding himself, including paddling the mud at the edge of the flow to stir up potential titbits and also browsing the brambles down there as well. There are just a few ripe fruits still on display, but amusingly the heron stalks the blackberries in exactly the same stealthy way he fishes – as if they might dart off the brambles and hide if they spotted him. The peregrines at St Johns were absent, possibly due to the fact that a bunch of scaffolders were working alongside the tower where they nest . Why are scaffolders so noisy always? I mean postmen don’t go around hollering all the time.

Due to a dozen mutually contradictory message streams in the media it’s either the end of phase 2 or the beginning of phase 3 – but whatever …… it all means it’s lethal to breathe but they hope we will all go and shop until our credit cards spontaneously combust and the economy is saved. We will celebrate the end of the crisis at Christmas by kissing lots of people and not having to make love while maintaining social distancing. Meanwhile the funeral directors are planning their summer holidays in the knowledge that they, at least, will have a good year. With luck the Airbnb hen party house opposite will re-open to young idealists to celebrate love and fidelity by getting drunk, going off with strangers and getting the male strippers back – Madame gets very concerned for them when they take a break on the patio outside with nothing on, apart from a velvet neckband and a large joint – not that, sort honestly! “They’ll catch their death” she says; to which I can only reply that she’ll catch her own if she falls off the dressing table.

So life’s rich tapestry continues here in Bath. Please don’t mention the smelly river or the hen parties to anyone in case it upsets the Tourist Board and definitely not the street beggars; back on the streets now that the milk of human kindness supply has dried up. All’s well that ends well – even if it hasn’t ended by a long mile. It’s a time of magical thinking when we can all have what we want just by wanting it (terms and conditions apply). Meanwhile here’s a photo of the canal today with a hard frost and misty air, and there are more links to older entries below. I was touched to see that yesterday someone read the very first entry I ever wrote. How lovely – as my old friend and mentor Don Streatfield might have said.

asparagus autumn Camino campervan repairs climate change climate emergency composting covid 19 deep ecology economic collapse environment environmental catastrophe environmental crisis field botany foraging Fungi garden pests global climate crisis global heating green spirituality herbal medicine intensive farming locally sourcing lockdown macro photography meditation no-dig pickling and preserving pilgrimage polytunnels preserving raised beds rats regenerative farming rewilding Sourdough species extinctions spring technology urban ecology urban wildlife walking water storage weeds wildflower meadows

Sunset, dusk, twilight.

I could have titled this post ‘Nocturne‘ – a bit posey; or – ‘Be careful what you pray for!’ – except that usually applies better to well deserved comeuppances, so I settled on the one it’s got because today we walked through and enjoyed the subtle differences between all three evening states and now as I write this I’m looking through the window at the night – not Van Gogh starry night or Whistler night and especially not Turner night but just the car park, the backs of the terrace and the fast food joint chimney.

We wasted much of the day waiting for a delivery from Royal Mail that never arrived. To recycle a quip from John Mortimer, writer and barrister, “it’s like tantric sex; you’re in all day and nobody comes.” So (moving rapidly on) we didn’t set out on our walk until 3.00pm. Years ago we were walking in Leigh Woods in Bristol when a tramp – ‘rough sleeper’ carries a whole different set of connotations nowadays; this was a man who had chosen to live in the woods for whatever reason. Anyway he came rushing up to us in a state of high excitement and begged us to follow him. “I’ve been living here for ten years and I’ve never seen one before”, he said, and he led us off into the wood where he had found the first thorn apple he, or we, had ever seen there. Jimson weed, devil’s Snare or thorn apple, it’s got a bit of a reputation for being poisonous/hallucinogenic and the RHS entry for it spends almost as much time describing how to kill it as it does to grow it. We, however, were pleased to see it, thanked him and went on our way.

Yesterday I mentioned here that we haven’t yet seen the otters on the river and blow me if we didn’t meet a man who had – earlier today. Yesterday too, I mentioned that we hadn’t noticed the resident heron for a few days and there we were near an improvised shelter (bender) on the bank watching a larger heron that we haven’t seen before when this man came up to us and told us that only this morning he’d seen a female otter with two cubs, swimming at the exact spot we were standing in. It was beginning to feel as if we were on a roll.

What next? Well, a little further on we saw in one spot – without moving – two swans, one cormorant, one kingfisher, our usual heron and two – yes two peregrines. Admittedly the peregrines were about 60 feet up on St John’s Church spire but that was a bit of a moment to savour, and remember; this is all in the very centre of Bath. A group of young men were passing and joined in the peregrine watching. “They’re up there on the nest platform” I said; and one of them replied “I know, my dad made the nest box and two of the little ones have got together and had babies!”

There were hordes of people out walking in the parks and on the canal in spite of the slate grey and rain bearing clouds overhead. Somewhere up there there was rain falling high above us because a rainbow had gathered together all the sunlight that we weren’t seeing and formed an inverted bowl over our heads. Dogs, children, adults, students in careless groups of eight and ten oblivious to the wide birth we were giving them. It was an almost joyful atmosphere as we grabbed what fresh air we could before retreating into lockdown and endless repeats on the television.

As we walked along the river beneath the railway station a long express train pulled in and we noticed for the first time that the lights inside the carriages were glimmering on to the platform. There’s a marvellous sense of inside/outside as it gets darker and the whole townscape slowly changes from day to night. The sky was washed with Paynes Grey, possibly my favourite watercolour; and stationary tree trunks that the spate had brought downstream were riffling the water, making the street lights dance. We quickened our pace to get back where the otters were before it got too dark to see them, but it wasn’t to be. Still; now we know where they are, we can take the binoculars and search for a holt. It was a lovely walk, and completely, unexpectedly rich as walks so often are.

And as I’m writing I remember that among the plants in flower that I listed briefly yesterday, I forgot the hedge woundwort and prickly sow thistle near the canal. The woundwort looks very like a pink/purple nettle, but the killer trick for identifying it is the smell of the crushed leaves that can be anything from mildly unpleasant to almost nauseating. It’s supposed to be effective against boils and such like. I just love the English names of these medicinal herbs; they’re little poems – two or three syllable haiku. Latin names are more useful but I wouldn’t be without Mrs Grieve and Geoffrey Grigson’s lists of local names. I remember an old countryman telling my sister the local name for dandelions – ‘pissabeds’ and giggling as my mother glowered at him. In fact she knew them all very well but never mentioned the more earthy ones.

And then back home, hungry as horses, we fell upon homemade and home grown baked beans; our own borlotti and our own rich tomato sauce mopped up with our own everyday sourdough. Life doesn’t get any better.

Wide

This has got to be one of the best views within 20 miles of Bath. Inevitably, given the limitations of a phone camera it’s no more than a taste, but from the top of Blackdown on the Mendip Hills you can see the River Severn as a pale streak below the sky and you’ll have to believe me that with no more than a turn of the head you can take in the Bristol Channel from the mouth of the Severn to the open sea, the end of the Cotswolds to the North, and to the West across the river you can see the Forest of Dean and beyond to the Brecon Beacons. Today we could even see Hay Bluff in the far distance, something like 80 miles away by road. Below and on the plain are the Somerset Levels and it’s an easy walk to Cheddar Gorge and Burrington Combe. It’s almost unfair to have so many nature reserves, SSSI’s and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty within the span of one gaze. Unfair, but who’s complaining? Here I am, the champion of post industrial landscapes and car parks; and William McGonagall of the urban wilderness, celebrating a far more conventional kind of nature.

If ever there was a place made for reflection and contemplation and blowing the dust off, this is it. The birds aren’t singing much at the moment, the chicks are hatched and fledged and there’s no need for showing off to potential mates, but in any case as we walked up from Tynings Farm we were swamped by the sound of a forage harvester getting silage in. We had to crest the hill before we could enjoy the silence that often seems to cloak the Mendips.

Roesel’s bush cricket – which was unscathed after being held very gently by our seven year old grandson.

Yesterday we spent the day in a very different landscape with our grandchildren and their mum and dad. In a busy suburb of Bristol, the countryside seems to reach into the city by way of fingers. An aerial photograph of Bristol might remind you of a wonky wagon wheel with spokes of green, but these spokes are under threat as never before from development. Our family can walk from their densely terraced street to their allotment, behind which there are open fields. They’re never going to be designated or protected notwithstanding the fact that we picked pounds of large sloes there yesterday, and our oldest grandson had tremendous fun catching grasshoppers, as he calls them. He’s lively and curious and these rather stressed fields, leaving aside the quantities of dog shit left everywhere by thoughtless dog walkers, are the bit of the natural world that he and his younger siblings can actually explore and enjoy. Soon they are going to be built over, and the horses that used to provide free manure to the allotmenteers were moved off on Friday. Our middle grandchild was deeply upset as she saw them being led away. Don’t ask me how we can resolve the constant tension between housing and open space, because it’s a nightmare; but wild and open space is as important for child development and grown up recreation as is warm and safe housing. We can’t let it all go into the developers’ offshore accounts.

Family sloe picking

As always, the paucity of the wildlife in the fields was more than made up for by the children. I’m always touched to see their parents struggling to solve the same problems and dilemmas that we faced in a previous generation. For good or ill our children, when they become parents, take with them the experience of our earlier attempts at playing mum and dad – not all of them very good because we had to learn on the job too.

And today belonged to the first field mushroom, the hosts of eyebright and tormentil, the heathers, vetches and trefoils, the cotton grass in the bogs, the south westerly blowing up from the sea, the space to talk and celebrate the fact that we are able to be out there in it and not least to thank our knees and one metal hinge for putting up with us.