Party In The Field

At least my cucumbers are growing well

One of the nice things about living in the depths of rurality is that an invitation to a birthday party does not necessarily equate to an evening squeezed into a corner of a crowded, pricey and painfully hip restaurant, shouting to be heard over the music, and wondering if it is socially acceptable to duck out of the dancing at a club afterwards. Last Saturday's party was thrown by my friend Marga* at her home, which happens to be a caravan on a 30 acre site of fields, woods and a dilapidated farmhouse and barn, a few miles out of Machynlleth.

As her caravan would probably only fit about four people at a push, and the farmhouse a construction site, we congregated around outdoor tables set up under what would have a good shot at winning the Mid Wales Large Awning competition, should such a thing be organised.

The caravan's original awning was extended by about four times its width by large square heavy canvas sheets ingeniously attached to metal ladders and ropes which were hoisted up over the caravan and tied off on the other side. Despite the evening sunshine the forecast was for rain around 10pm and we were intent on staying dry, apart from those who decided to go for a dip in the fast-flowing stream that bounded the field we were in. Others opted for the outdoor bath, heated by a woodfire beneath it.

A sunny afternoon in my garden

Marga bought the farm this spring and is attempting to get the tumbledown house into a liveable condition by Christmas, a major building project. She has plans to let some fields regenerate with native trees and use another to grow food on. A local farmer has already dumped a huge pile of manure there, so that's where the polytunnel will be! Her idea is that it'll be a place where people are welcome to drop by, stay for a while helping out with whatever needs doing, or maybe use the space for some artistic endeavour or rehearsal. 

As the global stock market appears to be crashing around our ears again it is an apposite time to reflect on the urgent need to establish better food sovereignty. The less reliant on imported food we all are, the better we will all cope with any economic shock to the global food distribution system. In late October the annual gathering of the National Food Sovereignty Movement will take place at Hebdon Bridge to discuss these issues and figure out what can be done.

And later today the Green Isle Growers veg box scheme that I'm part of will be giving a talk in Machynlleth about local small-scale veg production. I have a slot where I'll be examining the actual value of organically-grown veg compared with the amount of effort taken to produce it, based entirely on my own experience of the last couple of years. If you're lucky I might include a few titbits in next week's blog. 

A new Edible Mach site I helped construct last Saturday. It's modelled on a Victorian fruit garden and will have espaliered apple trees.

* Not her real name

And Your Bird Can Sing

An onion seedhead surveys my garden

In the ancient Welsh legend of Branwen the eponymous queen has been demoted to the scullery and given a regular beating because her half-brother, a nasty piece of work, had mutilated some horses belonging to the king. Her only friend is a starling which in a desperate bid for freedom she teaches to speak (in Old Welsh presumably, quite a formidable undertaking for a bird-brain), instructs it to locate her other brother who happens to be a giant, and ties a letter to its leg. Even though the bird could talk I suppose she didn't want to risk it forgetting what the message was on its long search.

I could be forgiven for thinking that a similar fate has occurred to one of my siblings and they're sending birds to find me (they must have lost their mobile phone). A wren last week came hurtling through the caravan door as I sat doing the crossword and spent a while flitting around the cramped space, chirping, presumably in an attempt to communicate with me. Any letter crying for help attached to its leg must have previously come loose and fallen off.

Harlech, where Branwen was from

It gave up eventually but then on Sunday night up in the outhouse where I sleep I opened the door and a blue-tit flew straight in. Again, any message it may have had for me it singularly failed to communicate. It didn't really utter any sound at all. It just flew around the room, clinging to the striplight, a wall-hanging, my armchair, the curtain-rail, even the top of the door, letting me get quite close to it as I tried to encourage it back out of the door. For a good half-an-hour I left it open but the bird refused to leave - maybe because I hadn't yet understood its message. In the end it was me who gave up, shut the door, turned the light off and went to bed. Early the next morning I tried the same tactic and this time it was off like a shot. I'm still searching for its handwritten note.

I'm reminded of the dolphins in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which, being more intelligent than humans, were aware of the Earth's imminent demise and spent a good while trying to alert the human race through all means at their disposal, inevitably misinterpreted as amusing acrobatic displays. Eventually of course the dolphins had to give up and leave Earth by their own means, their last message being misconstrued as “..a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the Star-Spangled Banner.” It actually meant So Long and Thanks For All The Fish.

.
In reality it's birds not dolphins that are sending us a message - about the warming planet. Research such as this finds that birds are living further north each year - e.g the little egret was recently only found on the Continent but is now frequently seen in England. Cetti's warblers are being spotted further north in Britain. And some British species, such as the golden plover or the snow bunting, will be unable to move further north and so face decline. Unlike dolphins they won't have an escape route to another dimension. 

What is this tomato plant trying to tell me?

Croeso Cymru

Despite living less than ninety miles from where I was born, I am in fact in a foreign country. Cross the border from Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire or Gloucestershire and you enter another land, one which has its own language, culture and history. Wales is a very different place from England. Too often it is dismissed by the English with a lame joke about the rain or the sheep. It is a visually stunning place, rivers tumbling down vertiginous slopes, vast green uplands, tumble-down stone cottages and barns dotting the landscape, little hamlets clustered around their chapels tucked away in each valley. Conifer forests form patchworks on the slopes. The rivers have sea trout, the sky is full of red kites and buzzards. And the Welsh, in my experience so far, are friendly despite the reputation for anti-English sentiment.

The Mawddach estuary

I've always loved visiting Wales on holidays, the feeling of having gone properly abroad with the bilingual roadsigns, the long unpronounceable place names and the dragon flags. Susan Cooper's “The Grey King”, part of the Dark is Rising series of novels, was a favourite when I was a teenager, evoking a sense of ancient Welsh folklore and Arthurian legend that stuck with me.

It's not a prosperous part of the UK, of course, and especially round here in mid Wales it is sparsely populated. Sheep farming and tourism are the main industries, the latter recently going to such lengths (literally) as the longest zipwire in Europe and underground trampolines in an abandoned slate mine. You can shoot pheasants too, of course, for a hefty price.

The cucumbers and tomatoes are competing for the roof 

Many of the locals around here are Welsh-speaking, so often I'll enter my local petrol-station shop and have no idea what the conversation is about. I've never experienced what some English people claim to have, that the conversation was in English but they quickly switched to Welsh when they saw an English person come in. I suspect this is simple paranoia playing tricks. Over the last couple of years I've tried to learn some basic phrases from a free podcast called SaySomethingInWelsh, so I can at least say hi and thanks as I buy my llefrith (milk). But to approach anything like conversational Welsh would require a serious investment in time and brain-ache. A seriously high proportion of people who try, I'm told, drop out before getting anywhere near fluent. Although it's a phonetic language so once you've learned the basic rules you can pronounce a sentence easily enough, it's one of the hardest to grasp.

There are a lot of English people living here too. Out of the five nearest houses to my land all are owned by English people apart from one, a Welsh family. Many of the people I know in Machynlleth who came to the town originally through working at the Centre for Alternative Technology are not Welsh. I'm glad though that living where I do, thirteen miles further north into the Welsh-speaking heartlands, I've been able to get to know quite a few Welsh people as well as the English (and Scots).

Friends of mine from Birmingham are currently spending a two week holiday on the Welsh coast at Tywyn and Harlech, and stopped off to see me on the way in as I'm literally on the main A road that brings in the tourists from the Midlands. I mention this as a spur to action to those of you wondering where to spend your next holiday. Come to Wales! It's great! And visit me on the way!

The last delivery I made to the veg bag scheme: rhubarb, cabbages, salads, kale and cucumbers

This was my stall last Sunday at the local monthly farmer's market

Life On Mars

This alien landed in my garden from the planet Gherkin.

If the earth were an apple, its atmosphere is the skin. Every living thing that we know of, the vast numbers of species that populate this place from fungi to fir trees, from crabs to Chris Evans, has its being within that skin. Every historical event has occurred somewhere in that thin and fragile membrane.  Only a few of us have ever left the skin, and then just skimmed the surface of it in the International Space Station. (Oh yes and apparently a few guys went to the Moon but that was before I was born - and I'm 40 now!)

We have not found any life anywhere else. Nothing on any of the other planets orbiting our Sun. Mars has no little green men, or canals. No cities or any other evidence at all showed up in the latest fly-by photos of Pluto. The jury's still out on a couple of moons of Jupiter and Saturn which have water and internal sources of heat, but if we were to find something there it's unlikely to have more than one cell to rub together.

This being comes from the star system Mole

Of course there are many billions of stars just in our galaxy, lots of them with planets, and the best guess is that there are 15-30 billion “Earths” out there (planets that are the right distance from their star potentially to harbour life.)  As scientists trawl through the data that the Kepler telescope gathered, just from a small patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation every now and then they find another in the “Goldilocks” zone  - ie not too hot, or too cold. Kepler 425b is the latest to hit the headlines. But we don't even know if it's made of rock or gas, let alone if it has water, let alone alien life, let alone intelligent alien life.

But with that many potential exoplanets out there, the chances seem good that life has sprung up elsewhere. Last year NASA made the bold announcement that they expect to find intelligent alien life within the next twenty years.  And last month a new $100m initiative called Breakthrough Listen was announced which over the next ten years will search the million closest stars to Earth, plus the centre of the galaxy, the galactic plane, and the hundred nearest galaxies to boot. If there is some alien civilisation with a radio transmitter beaming out a signal encoding their favourite sitcom, they hope to find it. And if they do, the Earth has no worked-out plan what to do next. The big question would be, of course, do we reply? 

Until then, this apple skin and all that lives beneath it is all we have got. Let's treat it with the utmost care it deserves.

The beautiful Torrent Walk near Dolgellau