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It’s early November. Winter has come, and the gardening season is over. My tiny vegetable patch is going to sleep. It’s been a good year, in spite of a poor growing season: I’ve eaten fresh potatoes, handfuls of peas, ruby chard, abundant parsley and mint. I still have a small patch of leeks. My only real disappointment has been my new strawberry plants. Beautiful plump scarlet fruits, but when I turned them over, every single one had been hollowed out underneath. Not by slugs, but by woodlice. Do woodlice eat strawberries? Oh yes!

 I think that the most important thing I have finally learned from growing my own vegetables is that every few years your entire crop of a particular plant will fail, even if it has done really well previously. You can make it less likely to happen, and you can prepare for it by planting a variety of crops, but you can’t stop it happening entirely. You just have to learn to put up with it. The history of agriculture is the history of a perpetual struggle. There have always been pests, from birds to potato blight. The images in medieval manuscripts such as the Luttrell Psalter of monstrous birds stealing seed corn from a sack, or boys in the fields scaring birds with slings, are replaced today by photos of thousands of greylag geese sitting smugly in the barley fields of Orkney, which they have just stripped bare. Local farmers have to be given a licence to shoot a specified number of the birds every year. During the mid-19^th century (1845-52), a fungus-like disease called Phytophthora infestans – late blight – destroyed much of the potato crop in Europe. In Ireland, where for political and economic reasons a large proportion of the population were dependent on potatoes as their staple food and no-one intervened to help them, millions starved to death or were forced to emigrate. Scotland was badly hit as well. I have had to give up planting Brussels sprouts or indeed any brassicas, after two really good years, because somehow my vegetable patch has become infected with clubroot. The sprouts stood up to a plague of caterpillars but the virus defeated them. At least nowadays we know what causes it.

The Romans, who didn't know why these things happened, depended heavily on divine intervention. Their staple crop was wheat, and they had a large number of minor gods and goddesses to protect their crops at every stage from sowing to storage, including protection from diseases. A favourite of mine is Robigus who protected wheat from diseases, especially wheat rust, a nasty fungal disease. There are several kinds of wheat rust, the commonest being Puccinia triticina, wheat leaf rust. (Wheat rust still causes significant crop losses world-wide, but scientists have apparently identified a gene which facilitates wheat rust and are hoping to turn it off.) Robigus had his own festival on April 25th, the Robigalia, at which a dog was sacrificed. According to Ovid’s Fasti, the dog represented the Dog Star, Sirius. The weather at the rising of the Dog Star tended to be hot and dry and crops ripened too soon, which the Romans believed made them susceptible to wheat rust (Ovid, Fasti 4.905 – 941).

The most effective way to kill insects, fungi and viruses is to drench your crops in powerful pesticides. However we now realise that soaking your food and your fields in toxic chemicals carries its own dangers, even if it is more effective than sacrificing a dog. If you are a commercial market gardener, however, dependent on the requirements of a supermarket chain to remain in business, you may not have much choice about using chemical pesticides and fertilisers. Don’t forget that supermarket chains feed most of the population nowadays, so we are all involved.

Anyway, pesticides don’t always work. Take slugs, for example. I remember one year after I had taken over my father’s vegetable patch and was trying to grow potatoes, perpetual spinach and French beans. I had a friend who was into organic gardening, so I tried to protect my plants from slugs by encircling them with coffee grounds, crushed eggshells and collars cut from plastic bottles. One set of neighbours invested in expensive nematodes which were supposed to kill slugs the ‘natural’ way. The old gentleman on the other side used the traditional blue slug pellets full of who-knows-what chemicals. All our crops got eaten, without exception. The sight of three rows of potatoes entirely stripped of their leaves, when they had done brilliantly in previous years, discouraged me so much that I gave up growing anything for years. The only thing I have ever found to have any effect on slugs whatsoever is little saucers of beer (I usually cheer myself up by drinking the other half of the bottle, so even if it doesn’t stop the slugs it’s not a total write-off).

Companion planting is another non-toxic method of pest control which I use. I always plant marigolds and nasturtiums among my vegetables. I can’t remember which vegetables they are supposed to protect from pests, or indeed whether they really do anything, but they certainly look pretty and they are self-seeding. My habit of dotting my onion sets around my containers is supposed to help as well. I have just learned that planting onions, leeks or chives among your strawberries is supposed to deter pests. I’ll try it.

The sobering thought in all this is that if you are currently gardening as an amateur in the UK, you can always go down to the supermarket and buy a bag of potatoes or beans. If you have a bad year, it’s disappointing but you won’t starve. But if you are dependent on what you grow for staying alive, it’s another story. You had better have a surplus stored from a previous year, or good neighbours who will share.

There are some services which are essential, in the UK at least. Access to the emergency services via a telephone or a personal alarm. Electricity for cooking, lighting, heating – most forms of heating need electricity to run the pump and controls, even if they are gas-fired, oil-fired, or heat pumps. Banking – it is now impossible to function without a bank account. There are services which you may not be using, but where you still need to deal with the paperwork, like television licences. All of them are now provided by privately run companies. You have to decide for yourself which company is trustworthy and will give you the best value. You have to sign up with the company, and pay for them regularly. Then there are constant mistakes which you, the customer, are responsible for dealing with. This is becoming increasingly difficult, because in order to save money and maximise profits for the shareholders, more and more of these services have to be accessed remotely, either online or by telephone. And this is not always easy or even possible. Often, it doesn't work.

Living on the fringes

Most of the decisions being made by companies about how their services will be accessed are made by people living in big cities. They clearly do not understand that in many areas of the British Isles, services which they take for granted are not available. For example, I live in the Orkney Islands, off the north-east coast of Scotland. A large number of people don’t even know where the Orkney Islands are. I have been asked in a post office in London if they were part of the UK. Recently, I had to change my mobile phone, broadband and electricity suppliers. All of these changes were prompted by an update in technology which is barely supported by the telecommunications in Orkney.

Digital Voice is a good example. All landline telephones are currently being changed to Voice over Internet Protocol or Digital Voice, for good and sufficient reasons. But Digital Voice “landlines” use broadband and don’t work during a power cut. And we get a lot of power cuts, often quite long ones. And large areas of Orkney have no mobile phone signal at all. You can look this up on the Ofcom website. I am not living in an isolated croft with no neighbours – I am not that stupid at the age of seventy-four. I live in a village, the third largest settlement in the island group. Until a year ago, the western half of my village had no useful mobile phone signal. My neighbours did report that they could usually get a couple of bars if they hung out of an upstairs window. I could get a signal by walking down to the beach 50 metres away, unless the weather was stormy (which it often is up here), when the signal disappeared. It didn’t matter because I used my landline when I was at home. So how does an old lady living alone call an ambulance or the fire brigade during a four-hour power cut if she can’t get a mobile phone signal? Fortunately one of the companies has improved its signal, so I switched providers and can now use my smartphone inside my house. I also changed broadband supplier to a company which appeared to have planned the switch better than my old one.

I have also changed my electricity supplier because I have storage radiators and needed to have a smart meter installed. They are discontinuing the radio signal which has controlled the off-peak electricity supply up till now. Many people in Orkney who have had smart meters installed have found that they do not work, because they cannot get a signal. I therefore changed to a company which has a better reputation regarding bills from smart meters than the old one. There are some scary stories out there about people having their bank accounts emptied without warning because the technology wasn’t working. Getting the money back can be a big problem unless you are a celebrity. Finding out which of these stories are true proved to be difficult. Nearly everyone I asked locally was dead scared of having a smart meter. When I get mine, I'll let you know!

You can’t get through to them

All of these changes have required multiple phone calls and emails. None has gone smoothly. I have spent hours on the telephone, pressing first one series of buttons and then another, waiting for 20 minutes or so with silly music playing. I then had to try to communicate with an operator in the face of crackling phone lines, a thick accent, and background noise from an open-plan office. And what about the times you are put on hold while they redirect your phone call to the right department, you hang on for half an hour and then the phone goes dead? Or you wait in a queue, only to be told to ring a different number, and when you finally get through after waiting in the queue yet again, you are told to ring the first number again? Often you have to contact the company over and over again, before you can get through to someone who understands what the problem is, and how to put it right. Frequently it appears that the database on which my records were stored has got scrambled up somehow. I already HAVE high blood pressure, thank you very much! In the past you could go into an office and speak face-to-face with a human being, who could liaise on the spot with someone more experienced if the problem was beyond them. But the offices are gradually being closed down.

The alternative is to do it online. My experience with attempting to book hotel rooms, train tickets, and flights has discouraged me from even trying to do this. And from what I have heard, many other people, including people of working age who are trying to sort things during their tea break or on their commute home, have trouble with this. Some websites are just badly designed or “not working properly that day, please try again later”. Sometimes you cannot do it yourself, you have to have help from someone trained to understand how the system works, even what technical terms to use. I am happy to send in my meter readings, pay bills, and buy a few things via Amazon, but the thought of trying to sort out a serious mistake online seems quite unrealistic to me.

And I really hate the recorded suggestions you get at the beginning of every phone call, suggesting that you should go online instead of waiting to speak to an operator. If I wanted to do that I wouldn’t be making a phone call.

There is no help available

Many companies don’t have engineers in remote areas like the Orkney Islands, or their engineers only come here intermittently. Often there is no local technical person you can pay to help. Finding out who is the right person to ask for accurate information is often very difficult. When I first heard about the Digital Voice changeover, nobody seemed to know what to do if you could not use a mobile phone for backup during a power cut. I had to write to my MP and he found out who I should be speaking to. I recently wanted to find out what sort of signal smart meters used, and whether it was available in my village. An internet search gave me a totally misleading impression of how smart meters work. Especially the AI generated answer. And I rang all sorts of local organisations and nobody had any idea, nor even any idea who to ask. I only found out when I changed electricity suppliers and they told me what signal their meters used.

Many organisations offering services, such as banks, are now legally barred from giving you any advice about what decision to make. You are supposed to get ‘independent’ advice. Where from? Not all charities have people available who are capable of giving it on particular services (one charity has recently told me, twice, that they didn’t know anything about my problem). How on earth is an old lady with no previous experience supposed to make an informed decision?

The most vulnerable are affected most

These problems impact unfairly on the most vulnerable in society, the elderly, the disabled and the poor. Can you imagine trying to fight your way through all this if you are severely dyslexic? Suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome? Being treated for depression or anxiety? On the sort of income which takes people to food banks? Let alone if you are elderly and have hearing or sight problems. And being poor means that every mistake which these companies make can be a catastrophe, since if they overcharge you, you can’t afford to wait for them to repay you.

As for the IT skills which the elderly famously lack, going on a six-week course on basic ‘how to use the internet’ for the elderly doesn’t give you the ability to solve specific problems as they come up. Being of working age means that your employer is likely to keep you up to speed with the latest major changes, and you can always lean across to the person in the next desk and say “How do you do this?” We used to do this when I was still working, and I really miss it.

It’s a mockery to suggest that people can be enabled to ‘live independently’ under these conditions. Since there are no longer enough carers and social workers to go round, due to public service funding cuts, it means that family members or friends have to fill the gap. Assuming they have the time and the skills themselves of course.  If you don’t have anyone capable nearby, you are in trouble. And not everyone is up to writing to their MP or ringing up Trading Standards.

What kind of society are we living in?

It is time-consuming, frustrating, highly stressful, exhausting, even frightening at times, trying to make sure that you are not cut off from essential services these days, or lose half your savings. What kind of society are we living in, when our most vulnerable members are being made to struggle so hard to do so?

London is a wonderful city. It’s so full of museums that no-one can know about all of them, so you can constantly be surprised by new ones. On a recent visit a friend introduced me to Sir John Soane's museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I was enchanted. Its plan is contrary to all the rules recommended for modern museum displays, but it’s great.

Sir John Soane was a successful architect in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. He also collected antiquities and paintings. He bought three adjoining houses in a Georgian terrace and filled them with his collection. When he fell out with his son and wanted to prevent him inheriting, he paid for a private Act of Parliament which gave the houses and their contents to the nation in perpetuity, and specified that nothing in their display should be changed at all. This means that the present museum is a warren of rooms opening out of each other. Some of them are filled in every corner with objects, others remain arranged as spacious living rooms with period furniture and rather nice paintings on the walls. There is a light well in the centre which runs through the three stories of the building from a skylight in the roof to the cellar. It is lined with shelves of antiquities and has a massive Egyptian sarcophagus at the bottom. There are tiny rooms the size of cupboards, also full of objects. The collection includes Greek and Roman antiquities, a copy of the Apollo Belvedere, the Egyptian sarcophagus, and bits of English medieval stonework. They are all closely packed into every available space, jumbled together without regard to date or provenance, and there is not a single label on any of the pieces. You have to look them up online. And it works! I can’t wait to go back.

My visit got me thinking about museum displays I have seen, and which I have loved or hated for various reasons. Of course different museums are aimed at different cohorts of visitors. Some are intended to be family-friendly, some are for visitors with a more specialist interest, and some are aimed at processing huge numbers of tourist groups who are coming just to get out of the rain and don’t actually have much interest in the past. (For this last group I would recommend a converted aircraft hangar with 12 artefacts, videos all round the walls, a coffee shop and a lot of toilets, rather than an actual museum. And call it “The [name of town] History Experience”).

Having no labels either works – or it doesn’t. About fifteen years ago I visited a museum in a large city in England which had a display of artefacts from Ancient Egypt in one of its galleries. They had attached the objects to the back of a showcase covering most of one wall of the gallery. The artefacts were excellent examples of their type but they hadn’t given them any descriptions at all, not even a one-word name, just a number. Either you had to buy a catalogue or you had to use the single computer at one end of the showcase. Needless to say, the computer was being monopolised by small children playing.  And those were the days before smartphones and apps. I was involved at that time in schools work covering the Ancient Egyptians, so I found this rather disappointing. I knew what most of the objects were, but I would have liked to know how old they were and where they were found.

One of the best displays I can remember seeing was in a national museum I visited in the Far East. It had a large collection of 9^th century CE Chinese stoneware dishes from a shipwreck. They could have put most of them into storage and only displayed a few of the best pieces. Instead they solved the problem most imaginatively by putting a few representative examples into display cases with explanations, and putting the rest onto a forest of Perspex ‘stalks’ standing up from the floor. Speaking as a visitor, I thought it was great. If you wanted the basic information it was there in the showcases, and if you wanted to examine more examples you could do that without having to write to an overworked curator and book an appointment in three months’ time. The display had a most attractive overall effect, and the ceramics were extremely beautiful.

Another major museum of my acquaintance at one time (long ago) summarised the entire Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) period in Britain by displaying a single stone handaxe in a showcase with dramatic lighting. To my certain knowledge, because I had seen them with my own eyes, their basement was stuffed full of stone tools from a variety of classic Palaeolithic sites. The Old Stone Age covers just over 98% of British history. And they only showed one tool, as an art object.

When I was working I was always told that labels should be kept short and written for a reading age of twelve years old. This is apparently the reading age of the average Guardian newspaper reader.  I have learned since then that the average reading age in Britain is eight years old, that of most Sun readers. A temporary exhibition in a museum that I visited in the last few years had pages of text on the walls beside the showcases, resulting in logjams of visitors standing in front of a single case for hours, solemnly reading each label. There is a happy medium between no labels at all and a wall-mounted textbook.

And disabled-friendly doesn’t just mean installing a stair lift. There are other disabilities. I have seen lengthy explanatory text, not just a few names in large font, on the wall behind a wide table-top case. “Visually impaired” visitors, i.e. anyone old enough to need reading glasses, had to keep putting their glasses on and off, or worse, switching from reading to distance glasses, as they tried to look at the objects and then find out about them. I saw one visitor bending over the showcase to get near enough to read the text, leaning their weight on the glass top… 

I think the best panel text I have ever seen was in the on-site museum at Skara Brae, the Neolithic village in Orkney. Their labels differentiated clearly and simply between different kinds of evidence about each artefact.  What the object was; what evidence, such as C14 date or food residues could be obtained from it; and what could be deduced from this evidence, such as date or diet, were stated in different sizes of type. I wish more museums would do that so that the general public could understand how we learn about the past from archaeological evidence, what is fact and what is an educated guess.

My research continues. Museums of the world, I'm still out there. Watch this space…

Reader, when you hear the word ‘pottery’, what do you think of? A tasteful piece of Clarice Cliffe on the Antiques Roadshow? An archaeologist telling us how Grooved Ware has overturned all our ideas about the Neolithic in Britain? Well, I think of rats.

Long ago, when my son was young, we kept guinea pigs. In summer, they had a run on the lawn, but in winter they lived in the garden shed, well supplied with hay and guinea pig food. After a while I noticed that the bottom of the shed door had been gnawed until there was a hole there. There were clear tooth marks. Rats! A common pest in suburbia, where people feed the birds and aren’t always careful about what they put on the compost heap. Of course it was only to be expected that they would enjoy guinea pig food, which is mostly grain. I wasn’t surprised by their efforts on the wooden door, but I was impressed by their determined work on the lid of the plastic bin where we stored the food. Did they actually swallow shavings of red plastic and did it really do them no harm? This incident got me thinking about pottery. They couldn’t have knawed through that. If I had stored my grain in a thick-walled ceramic bucket with a stone lid on top the rats wouldn’t have stood a chance.

And that got me thinking about how easy it is to make pottery, if you are not too particular about what it looks like, or its fire-resistant and water-retaining properties.  Although you can improve a leaky piece of ceramic by burning a bit of milk inside it.

I was once employed by a local authority which was having a family day in a country park. At that time I was known to be working on medieval pottery at a museum nearby and they wanted me to run an activity making pots. They supplied a shed and a pile of timber offcuts and I sourced the clay. The families spent the morning kneading this clay and mixing in various tempering materials such as sand and crushed shell and chaff, which I obtained from the local pet shop. They made pinch pots and in the afternoon we put the pots into a haphazard heap of wood and set light to it. As the activity only covered one day we didn’t even have time to dry the pots first, which is normally regarded as vital. If you don’t dry them out thoroughly the pots have a tendency to explode when tiny pockets of water reach boiling point.

The wonder of it was that after only a few hours in that inadequate bonfire some of the pots had actually fired (some had only fired in parts). Clay has to be heated to a temperature of at least 500 degrees C to make the irreversible change to ceramic, albeit rather grotty ceramic. If we had had twice as much wood and twice as much time I think our pots would all have fired into real ceramic vessels. They probably wouldn’t have been suitable for boiling porridge over a fire, but they would have kept the rats out.

And what do you do in areas without trees, like the Northern and Western Isles? Well, if you don't have wood for the firing you can use peat. Derek Hall in " The Scottish Medieval Pottery Industry: a pilot study" (Tay & Fife Archaeological Committee 2016) considered that peat was a perfectly likely fuel for medieval pottery kilns in Scotland. According to a Wikipedia entry, peat was used to fire pottery kilns in the Netherlands, which was another area without trees. For example, the potteries established at Gouda in the 18^th century used peat as fuel.

And you really don’t need an elaborate kiln. My crude bonfire has historical parallels. In the Hebrides, 19^th century housewives made a type of pottery called ‘craggan’ or ‘crogan’ ware in the cooking hearths of their crofts. They used local clay, tempered simply by leaving in the sand and fine gravel which it contained naturally, and only removing larger stones. The pots were handmade, coil-built, sometimes with simple impressed decoration, and left to dry for twenty-four hours. Incidentally, you don’t need sun to dry them either: a craft potter in the Orkney island of Westray told me that he found a strong wind dried his products quite adequately. Then the craggans were fired in the ordinary cooking hearth in the centre of the farmhouse, with burning peats put inside and around them. When they had been fired for long enough to turn them into ceramic, milk was poured over them inside and out to seal the porous surfaces. They were usually used for liquids (beer, water, buttermilk and so on) and had a neck over which a piece of sheepskin could be tied as a lid.

From the mid-19C until the 1930s, at the small village of Barvas on Lewis in the Hebrides, a peculiar ware was made by the same process but copying the forms of the factory-made china tea sets which were starting to appear in Scotland. It was known as Barvas ware. It may have been made largely for tourists.

Pottery can be an exquisite and subtle art form, requiring great skill and technical knowledge to reach perfection. From Chinese porcelain and Japanese tea bowls to Wedgewood and Bernard Leach, it rightly fills our museums and art galleries today. But remember that if you just want to keep out rats, it’s  fairly simple to make.

The early prehistoric rooms in Orkney Museum are on the ground floor of the building, leading off one another. When you have been past a caseful of exquisite polished stone axe heads, whale vertebrae made into bowls, and some of the famous Grooved Ware pottery (Neolithic), you come into another room where steatite burial urns from Bronze Age cists and eagle claws from the famous Tomb of the Eagles catch the eye. But my favourite object in that room is a small flat trapezoidal piece of dull black stone, rather inconspicuously displayed on the top shelf of the showcase in the centre of the room. It is part of a Bronze Age necklace.

I like it because it is an interesting intellectual exercise. It is one of those finds where only a small part of an object has been found, but you can tell what was there originally if you know how to recognize it. I did a lot of that during the years I worked writing reports on medieval pottery, recognizing London Ware pitchers from a small piece of the spout, or St Neots Ware bowls from a fragment of an inturned rim. That’s archaeology. An awful lot of the time you are dealing with small broken pieces of  the original artefact. To display them to the public in a museum case does take a certain amount of creativity.

This little piece of black stone comes from the peat moss at Grind, Tankerness, in the East Mainland of Orkney. That is to say, it was recognized in a peat which had come from that moss, by William Mitchell, who donated it to the Orkney Antiquarian Society. Unfortunately I have not found a record of the date it was found, but since it was published in 1934-5 it must have been found before then ⁽¹⁾.   It is one of  the spacer plates from a Bronze Age multistrand necklace. If you tip it sideways you can see that there were four holes bored through it to hold the strings of the necklace. Its shape was designed to hold the strands in the right position to give the necklace a crescentic outline. It has geometric decoration punched into the flat surface. None of the rest of the necklace was found – imagine trying to find small black beads in black peaty soil –  but the presence of a whole 4-strand necklace can be inferred from this small object. 

It is referred to on the label as jet, which carries the implication that it was imported from Yorkshire, which is the nearest source of jet. William Kirkness, who published it, believed it to be lignite or cannel coal, both of which can be found in Scotland. However without scientific testing, which as far as I know has not been carried out on this piece, it is not possible to distinguish jet from albertite. Albertite was used for jewellery in the Bronze Age in Orkney. There are beads from Skara Brae and Swandro on Rousay, and a V-bored button-shaped object from the Tomb of the Eagles believed to be made of albertite. The Swandro bead material has been confirmed by several different methods of scientific analysis. There is a deposit of albertite at Dingwall, just north of Inverness, and in Orkney on the NE shore of Stronsay there is bed of rock which apparently resembles albertite in composition ⁽²⁾.  So the spacer plate might be jet, but it might be any of these other rocks.

So what did the necklace look like? My drawing is based on a number of complete and partial Bronze Age ‘jet’ spacer-plate necklaces found at various places in Scotland such as Poltalloch, Killy Kiaran and Mount Stewart. The carved design on the Poltalloch necklace is said to have retained traces of a white substance which would have made it stand out more against the black background. They appear to have been worn by women, and the similarity of their shape to gold lunulae has been noted. Most are now in the National Museum of Scotland, and their online collections database has images of some of them.

It reminds us that Orkney was important in the Bronze Age as well as the Neolithic or the Viking age.  Many people don’t know about the existence of the beautiful sheet gold discs from the largest barrow at the Knowes of Trotty, or the remains of an amber necklace from the same grave, because they are in the National Museum in Edinburgh. Perhaps someone could donate some really good replicas to the museum; after all there is a replica of the Tankerness Hood on display in the Iron Age gallery.

1. Kirkness, William  (1934-5) ‘Note on the discovery of a plate from an early Bronze Age necklace', Proc Orkney Antiq Soc, vol. 13, p.41 & Fig.2
2. British Regional Geology: Orkney and Shetland  1976, Natural Environment Research Council; Institute of Geological Sciences, Chapter 8 Old Red Sandstone of Orkney, Page 80