Vlog: Mindfulness

I didn't really buy in to the whole 'mindfulness' thing until the Covid lockdowns. As an escape from the house (and to get fitter) I started to take longer walks in the countryside. At the same time, I was reading books by people like Jeremy Lent, Florence Williams and Merlin Sheldrake that explained how science was 'catching up' with what spiritual people already knew - that we are part of an amazingly complex and intricate web of connections created by Nature. And recognising that link and re-establishing a relationship with the natural world is physically and mentally good for us.

It's certainly made me appreciate the value of sometimes doing nothing more than taking in a good view or 'forest bathing' (I wrote more on this subject here).

Here's a short video:

End of May ramblings

Just a couple more days and we're into June and well and truly into Summer. The weather is a mixed bag at the moment but there are more good days than bad and there's been plenty of sunshine. Sadly there's also been a fair bit of wind from the north which has kept temperatures down but I have no complaints. It's good walking weather and it's a joy to feel solid ground under my shoes instead of mud halfway up my wellies. 

The Daffodils are gone and the Bluebells are going over but the meadows are full of daisies and buttercups. And the Holly trees are in flower. I wonder how many people even know that Holly has a flower? Well it does and the ovary at the centre will become the bright red berries in the Autumn.

The Hawthorn trees are in bloom ranging from white to pink in blossom and, like the Holly, each flower will become a bright red Haw berry in due course.

And the Ash trees are producing their seed pods, known as Ash Keys. These are edible and best picked and pickled while they are this young. There's a good recipe here.

Nature's bounty. It just gets better and better from this point on.

The Cooper's Hill Cheese Roll

Today is the day of the insane Cooper's Hill Cheese Roll in Gloucestershire. 

Every year thousands gather around Cooper’s Hill to watch several races - each with upwards of 40 contestants. A t the top of the hill the Master of Ceremonies releases a nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese which can take on speeds of over 70 miles an hour. Then the contestants chase after it down the precipitously steep slope (it's a 1:2 gradient and the hill is 200 yards from top to bottom. At the bottom of the hill, instead of having some kind of soft barricade or hay bales, there is the local Brockworth Rugby team waiting for you. 

‘Cheese Rolling on Cooper’s Hill’ painted by Charles March Gere in 1948, from the Museum of Gloucester Collection.

The first runner to get to the bottom of the hill wins the contest and the cheese. Bones will break. Bruises will bloom. Some will be hospitalised. But still the event goes on year after year. Of course, there have been attempts to ban it on Health and Safety grounds but locals then did it secretly and unannounced. They even once did it at night which resulted in even more injuries than usual. So now the authorities let them get on with it ... and have medical teams on standby.

After the main races have finished, it’s the public’s turn to give the hill a go. There is no cheese to chase but if you are game enough you can roll (or throw) yourself down the hill. 

No one knows how long the event has been going on - the first written evidence is from a message written to the Gloucester town crier in 1826. But even then it was apparent the event was an old tradition - some believe it coud have been going on for over 500 years.

That's a lot of bandages and plaster casts.  

Vlog: Miscellaneous Meander #9

Back from Scotland and wandering over the Chiltern Hills with Harris the pug.

Hunting the Earl of Rone

Yesterday was the first of four days of celebration unique to the village of Combe Martin on the coast of North Devon. The Hunting of the Earl of Rone is an annual custom that supposedly marks the Earl of Tyrone fleeing from Ireland to Devon in 1607. However, its similarity to other festivals across the UK and Europe during May suggests that it has its roots in pre-Christian seasonal rites.

Over the four days of the Spring Bank Holiday weekend the ‘Earl of Rone hides in the village and surrounding woods. People dressed as Grenadiers, a Hobby Horse, a Fool and Mediaeval villagers hunt for him every day until he is captured on the Monday night. He is then mounted  'backsy-fore' (back-to-front) on a donkey and paraded through the village and down to the sea. Bizarrely, he is occasionally dismounted and shot by the grenadiers. However, he is then miraculously revived by the Hobby-horse and Fool, re-mounted on the donkey, and carried onwards to his fate. At the final shooting on the beach, he is not revived, but thrown into the sea.

Local legend says that he was Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who was forced to flee from Ireland in 1607 and was shipwrecked in the local bay known as Raparee Cove. Hiding in the woods and surviving only on ships’ biscuits (which he wears around his neck), he was eventually captured by a party of Grenadiers sent from Barnstaple. There is no historical evidence that Hugh O’Neill ever landed in North Devon and history tells us that he actually reached Spain and lived out his life there, so why he should become the focus of the custom is a real mystery. 

But then, like a lot of folk customs, the truth really doesn't matter. Like so many other events - particulalrly in May - this is about a town celebrating itself. 

The custom is run by a council of villagers, but any local from Combe Martin, or the surrounding parishes of Berrynarbor, Trentishoe and Kentisbury, is welcome to dress up and join in. Visitors are also welcome to come to watch and enjoy the festivities but, as tradition demands, collections are made throughout the weekend and once costs have been covered, surplus money is donated to good causes in the village.

Long may it continue.

Hemlock and livestock

Here's a question for you ... 

How much poison is there in our food?

I ask this because, while out walking with my dog yesterday I found quite a lot of Hemlock growing in a field of barley. 

Hemlock (Conium maculatum) is a member of the annoying complicated carrot family; complicated in that many species look similar but some are good to eat, some don't taste great and some are deadly poisonous.

Compare and contrast ...

Cow Parsley (harmless and edible)

Common Hogweed (harmless and edible)

Yarrow (harmless and edible)

Giant Hogweed (poisonous and will cause blistering on skin if touched)

Hemlock (DEADLY poisonous)

You can see how similar the plants are. I can tell at a glance which is which. But it took me some time before I was 100% sure enough to eat any of them. 

The devil is in the details - the shapes of flower petals and leaves, the colours and structure of the stems etc. 

One easy way to identify Hemlock is to look at the stems. If you see purple blotches - it's Hemlock. Other members of the carrot family may have purple areas of stem but not blotches.

See the blotches? That's Hemlock.

Now compare to Cow Parsley - areas of purple and green but not blotches.

The poisonous nature of Hemlock has been known for millennia. It was the plant that was given to the Greek philosopher Socrates at his execution. And Shakespeare mentions it as 'the insane root' in one of Banquo's soliloquys in Macbeth (the three witches also include it as an ingredient during their 'Double double toil and trouble' incantation). 

Hemlock contains alkaloid toxins including coniine and gamma-coniceine, which cause muscular paralysis, leading to respiratory failure and eventually death. Only a tiny amount of Hemlock can prove fatal to a human or to livestock.

Which is what prompted my question at the top of this post. 

I spotted at least five large Hemlock plants yesterday. So when the combine harvester gathers in the crop in late summer, what happens then? Usually, the Barley grain is separated from the chaff, which is bundled up into haybales that are then used as winter feed. Will the Hemlock be bundled up with it? 

Should I tell the farmer it's there?

I'm going to find out what I should do - so watch this space.

Books worth reading #23 - 'Last Chance to See' by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

I suppose I should have waited until I reached 'Books worth reading #42' before I published this post. 

But, as today is Towel Day, the annual celebration of the life and work of author Douglas Adams, it seems appropriate enough. 

Douglas, as I'm sure you know, was best known as the creator of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently books. He was also something of a futurist, environmentalist and philosopher and many of the ideas he explored in his fiction books have genuinely come to pass. Sadly, he died before the advent of smartphones (he died tragically young aged 49 in 2001) but he would have loved them as they are exactly what his proposed Hitchhiker's Guide 'electronic book' predicted. 

However, I'm going to focus today on his only published non-fiction book, Last Chance to See, which he co-authored with biologist Mark Carwardine (Note: I suppose you could call The Meaning of Liff - a book he co-authored with John Lloyd, a non-fiction book too although it does contain fictional meanings of words). 

It's an extraordinary book in which Douglas and Mark travel around the world to visit some of the world's rarest animals. The idea was to see first-hand the reasons why animals like the Aye-Aye, the Mauritius Kestrel and the Kakapo (a large green flightless parrot) are facing extinction - invariably it's because of human activity. But the authors also wanted the book to celebrate the brilliant work being done by passionate conservationists to bring these species back from the brink. The book is shot through with Mark's insights and observations and all pulled together by Douglas's wit and enthusiasm. 

It's my favourite book of all time. And my first edition copy (seen above) is very special because it's signed by both authors.

I was lucky to meet Douglas on several occasions and I always (cheekily) took along a book for him to sign. You can read the full history of events on a previous blogpost here.

Last Chance to See is a magnificent book and it's a great tragedy that Douglas never got to write any more in this idiom. We do get a taste of what might have been in the posthumously published The Salmon of Doubt in which a magazine article - which could one day have been the chapter of a new book - describes his experience of swimming with Manta Rays. It has all the wit, clever observation and charm of Last Chance.

Oh, what might have been.

Worm Charming in Cornwall

Life is full of curious coincidences. 

Just a couple of days ago, when discussing the numbering system Yan Tan Tethera (see here), I mentioned my languages teacher at school, the late Richard Gendall. 'Dickie', as everyone knew him, was a folk singer and songwriter, a passionate supporter of Cornish identity and culture and was a major player in the revival of the Cornish language. His son Phil was one of my very best friends at school and we played in a band together. Phil was into all the same things as I was - notably art - and went on to create a successful graphic design company that aims to promote local culture in a positive way. Pick up any brochure for a Cornish attraction and Phil's hand is probably involved somewhere. 

But now, here's that coincidence ... 

Two days after writing about Dickie Gendall, I see an article in The Guardian newspaper all about artist Georgia Gendall - Phil's daughter and Dickie's granddaughter - who has done something extraordinary by creating an annual arts event in Cornwall based on, of all things, worm-charming. 

I'll quote directly from The Guardian article here: 

'Worm charming – or grunting, or fiddling – is an age-old art and an established competitive sport of several decades: a notched wooden stick is scraped close to the earth, the vibrations mimicking the rhythms of rain to bring worms up to the earth, where they are harvested for bait. But on this bright blue Sunday afternoon in Cornwall, traditional methods pale in comparison with the unconventional (and it’s a peaceful operation: all worms caught will be returned to the wild). The teams file in to the festive sound of Gweek Silver Band and unload their arsenals. There are instruments, watering cans, graters; a musical saw, a lime green foam roller, papier-mache seagull feet; country dancers, croquet sets and one woman who produces an entire mini cocktail bar, her silver shaker her tool, its spoils perhaps more of a motivation than the official artist-made prizes. The artist behind all this is Georgia Gendall, 31, currently wearing a pink hi-vis with “WORM JUDGE” sprayed on the back. Worms have long been part of her art, she explained earlier in the week, over tea in her studio, a static caravan on a farm on the beautiful Roseland peninsula, and she hopes that the contestants come away with a new respect for them.'

“They’re amazing, but they’re really absurd,” she says, over an hour’s lighthearted but thoughtful conversation. “My work always has that balance between something very normal and very absurd, mashing those things together.” Her studio chipboard walls are laden with work, such as a functioning kinetic sculpture made of biscuits and pasta that uses Jammie Dodgers as its turning cogs and a pink, Barbara Hepworth-like sculpture with a hole in it that is actually a cow’s well-loved salt lick. 'Agriculture and rural life is both a theme in Gendall’s work and her reality. Moving from a conventional studio to the farm, where she also works as a gardener and seasonal shepherd, reshaped her outlook. Last year’s lambing season – with her hands lodged in “intangible places, a bodily experience of learning with touch” – pushed her towards gooier materials, exploring in-between states and natural degradation. Toothpaste has become one medium, after one striking morning of sitting at the sharp end of a sheep having just brushed her teeth, lurid pink insulation foam another. “I particularly suffer from picking materials that shouldn’t really be used for art, but that’s part of it,” she says, her knuckles flecked with soil. “It reflects the impermanence and ever-changingness of life.” (Almost perfectly on time, a bit of spaghetti falls off the biscuit sculpture.) 

She not only subverts pastoral art, but specifically the popular image of “Cornish” art, still caught between the 20th-century St Ives school and endless commercial seascapes. Gendall, who was born in Cornwall, mentions the salt lick, one of several first shown at the brilliant group exhibition Thanks for the Apples at Falmouth Art Gallery in 2021. “For me they interrogate the idea of Cornish art because they look so much like something that would have been carved in St Ives, but they’re licked by cows – and they are Cornish art because they’re licked by an animal that is part of the ecosystem,” she says cheerfully. “It’s sort of sticking two fingers up at what’s expected.”

Her work is also about queering the landscape. Rural areas can be “challenging for people who are queer because they don’t find it an accepting environment”, says Gendall, who lives nearby with her girlfriend, also an artist. “Actually I feel most myself here, I feel released by it.” Recently she realised that the way her work flips familiar things is about “embodying queerness. I want to make everything look at something from another angle, which really is my experience of being queer in the world. That’s been a revelation.” Though ultimately, she says, “all I really want to do is make people go ‘huh!’ and have a good time.” 

She couldn’t have pulled it off better than at the Worm Charming Championships. Although Gendall sees it as part of her art because she sets the parameters, “everyone has this little space to do exactly what they want for half an hour. And that just doesn’t happen in this world.” Gendall attended Central Saint Martins but returned to Cornwall after five years in London. She set up an art space in an allotment, which helped her find a local community of artists, and says can make work here that she couldn’t elsewhere: “You’re afforded that permission through belonging through time.” At the same time, she finds the romanticised idea of making art in Cornwall far from the realities of the local housing crisis. “It’s about pushing preconceptions of what it means to live and work here, try and find space here. Most of the people I know live on boats, in sheds, caravans, vans on the coastal path. It’s a really complicated place.” 

What a fantastic idea.

Full article is here.

When is a Mint not a Mint?

Back in September (see here) I wrote a blogpost about 'old money' - the pounds, shillings and pence system - that we had when I was a young lad. We've since seen a revolution in our currency with decimalisation, the loss of the half pence coin, and the introduction of the £1 and £2 coins and plastic notes to replace paper. 

However, a quieter revolution has been going on beneath the surface in the past decade - the replacement of physical cash with cards and app-based payment systems. 

Who carries cash any more? 

Very few of us it seesm. 

And that raises issues for the Royal Mint. And, of course for coin collectors. 

I recently read that, in March 2020, the Mint had 26 times more £2 coins than it needed and eight times too many two pence pieces. That excess amounted to £89 million ... so there would be no need to mint any more £2 coins for a decade. I also read that, between 2008 and 2019, there was a 59% decline in the volume of cash payments. This was predicted to reach 65% by 2028. However, the Covid lockdown and people's fears about contaminated coinage have accelerated a change in consumer habits. In 2011 six out of every 10 transactions were cash. During 2021, that dropped to less than three in 10. It's now suggested that the figure will drop to less than 1% by 2028. Physical cash, it seems, is doomed. 

So what does that mean for the future of the Royal Mint - the world's oldest company (created in 886CE)?

They will, I'm sure, continue to produce commemorative coins - they already produce many strikes that are never intended to go into general circulation. But they are looking to a future where coins are no longer being used as currency and are, therefore, developing new areas of business.

One such area is removing and recovering precious metals from disused or obsolete technology. The UK produces 90-100 tonnes of e-waste every year and the Mint has developed techniques that can extract gold of 99.9% purity. They're also employing jewellers to design bespoke items for sale. Royal Mint will eventually become a brand.

The companies that adapt will survive change. The ones that stick to their guns will stagnate and die. It seems like the Royal Mint will be around for a while longer yet. They will certainly outlive coins anyway.

But a big part of me will be sad to see the demise of the reliable physical coin.

A pound coin doesn't stop working when the internet crashes.

Yan Tan Tethera

Yan Tan Tethera is a sheep-counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Northern England and some other parts of Britain. The words are numbers taken from Brythonic Celtic languages such as Cumbric which had died out in most of Northern England by the sixth century, but they were commonly used for sheep counting and counting stitches in knitting until the Industrial Revolution, especially in the fells of the Lake District. 

Though most of these number systems fell out of use by the turn of the 20th century, some are still in use. Curiously, the exact pronounciation even varies within counties.

(Taken from Wikipedia) 

Now compare that to the original Celtic languages:

Curiously, I remember once being told by my languages teacher at school - the late great Cornish language revivalist and folk singer Richard Gendall - that when he was a child growing up in Penzance in the 1930s he would hear fishermen at Mousehole and Newlyn counting crates of fish in Cornish.

As you can see from the above table, the origins of Yan Tan Tethera are easy to spot.

And I can't leave this subject without an appearance by the equally late and great Jake Thackray:

Scotland - Final Day

What better way to spend my final day in Scotland than by driving up the side of a mountain?

The South Chesthill Estate gamekeeper, a splendid chap called Ainster, offered to take us up there in his Argo eight wheeler and how could we refuse?

It was quite the trip but worth it for the views alone. 

Our destination was a freshwater spring-fed loch called Lochan Creag a' Mhadaidh. It's kept stocked with brown trout but few were biting today. Ainster reckons that the cold spell has retarded insect hatchings - certainly the Mayflies have yet to swarm - so the fish aren't as big or as hungry as they should be at this time of year. Meanwhile, I wonder how he recognised a 'cold spell' - we were up so high that there was a small amount of snow lying around. 

 

Up in the hills above Glen Lyon you'll also find the Tigh Na Cailleach (House of the hag) It's a kind of drystone shrine, thatched with rushes and decorated with some of those amazing river-carved stones that you see on local gateposts. The largest stone is known as the Cailleach, or 'hag'. The next largest is called the Bodach or 'old man' and the third and smallest is the Nighean or 'daughter'.It is thought to be an ancient shrine to the cult of the Mother Goddess. Each spring the 'family' are brought out of their house, and each October they are returned for the winter before Samhain - a tradition that has been going on certainly for hundreds of years, but possibly even thousands. Legend has is that the Cailleach gives birth to a new child every hundred years. Writing in 1888, Duncan Campbell said that there were 12 stones, although this may have been said to give the site a Christian spin, associating it with a St Meuran (probably St Mirin) and his eleven disciples. Today there are 7 stones in total.  

After a slow and uncomfortable (if scenic) return down the mountainside we said our goodbyes to Chesthill House, which had been our home for the week. It really is a grand place. And we discovered that Benedict Cumberbatch and family rented it over Christmas, along with his parents. Learning that his mother Wanda Ventham - who I very much had eyes for in my teen years when she starred in Gerry Anderson's UFO - had been sleeping in the same room I was in gave me some small amount of nerdy excitement.

We enjoyed our final evening with a meal of haggis, mash and neeps and some good whisky. 

But not too much as, the following morning, it was back to England with an eight hour drive of some 460 miles. 

Scotland saw us off in style with some magnificent misty views of Loch Tay.

Bye bye Alba.

Be back soon. 

Meanwhile, enjoy a video of the drive up the mountain: