Oh come on, don’t quibble, given the third line of Blake’s poem, sheep make far more sense than “feet”.  In spite of stuffing his poems with the woolly beasties. I suspect that the crazed urban anarchist would not have recognised a baa-lamb if it had butted him full pelt.  Those sheep seem to be everywhere at the moment, although this blog has been so long germinating, I can’t for the life of me remember what the sheep have to do with herbs.   I am writing this as the radio chugs through Beethoven’s “Shepherds’ hymn” after a rather good thunderstorm. I hope the shepherds had their sheep shorn before it hit them. There’s nothing worse than handling a saturated sheep unless it’s a dead saturated sheep.Unlike most people I find the smell of wet sheep far less unpleasant than that of wet dog. I had originally put “Sheep may safely graze” down as the opening voluntary for my funeral, but was pre-empted by the organist  at my mother’s own  funeral last year, notwithstanding her demand for “No Bach” (“he drones on so!”) then my niece had it at her wedding, so I realised that  I would have to regale the guests with something different.  Haven’t decided what yet. Told Cass, my daughter to make sure we (?) have “Hit the road Jack” at the end though.

Someone recently told me that this blog had a cult following. My reaction was  amazement that anyone actually reads the thing. I never have the time to read anyone else’s though periodically I do try and have a look at Deirdre’s from the Cloisters NY, which is both erudite and beautifully presented  (http://blog.metmuseum.org/cloistersgardens/). What is notable is the number of hits “William Turner and the Renaissance Garden” gets compared with all my other blogs. Does this mean I should be more factual and less subjective? I thought the whole point of blogging was to get over a personal point of view rather than to be tediously didactic, besides, anything factual takes hours of  research which costs money as opposed to merely spewing out opinions

Recently I saw another reference in Zoe Hawe’s excellent “herbal journal ” (from www.pomegranate.com) to the fact that Cinnamon was supposed to alleviate the effects of Diabetes 2. Far be it from me to miss an opportunity for a  serious and enlightening debate with an allopath, so I just happened to mention this to my doctor during my prescription review whereupon she became predictably aerated. Although it’s more than  twenty years since a professor at the Wellcome pointed out to me that only about 14 %- 17% of traditional herbal medicines have any validity, I feel that it’s a bit like God, you don’t necessarily believe in the old dear, on the other hand you don’t want to offend him in case you happen to trip across him just as the last bar of “Hit the road Jack” fades from the crematorium’s speaker system.  I therefore continue to use cinnamon even though the doctor says that it is her pills that are keeping me going. On traditional medicines that actually have a genuine beneficial effect, at the beginning of November, the “Sunday Times”  featured Andrew Sullivan on the use of Cannabis, pointing out that it has been used medicinally “for millennia” (sic) and describing its currently increasing popularity in America for dealing with all manner of unpleasant conditions. Paradoxically, the curious thing, to me at least, is how long it took Western civilization to catch on to its pharmaceutical value,  -in  England not until 1838. In Western Europe, “chanvre” had indeed been grown extensively for textile use  almost since the beginning of time but was it in fact a Mallow as suggested by Pliny or Eupatorium cannabinum, a more likely plant in the Northern European climate?  If “chanvre” wasn't Cannabinum sativum var indicum, it is odd that the crusaders, many of whom like Frederic “Stupor mundi” went native and adopted Islamic hedonism, are never recorded as having begged, borrowed or stolen a plant that made their opposition so obviously happy. Is it too imaginative to suggest that such records didn’t exist because with the usual habit of the ruling classes of keeping all the goodies to themselves, most Prince-Bishops would have done something nasty to the fingers of those chroniclers who gave away the source of their happiness? Equally they would undoubtedly have torn the arms and legs off any peasant caught enjoying a quiet roll-up, the difference in punishment between then and now being merely a matter of degree.. So, we ask, can it be that all those naughty secretive  Templars etc with their notorious lack of er, shall we say “lack of certain inhibitions” carried on like that because they were really as high as kites?  And before someone writes in, I am aware that some botanists tell us that the subspecies C sativa sativa is useless as a herb on which to get high and this therefore was surely the plant employed in the medieval textile industry. However when hippies have bred so many potent variants on the species in a relatively short space of time, this seems a dodgy argument.

And no, you can’t buy either cinnamon or cannabis from me even though we stock the biggest range of medieval materia medica in Europe (yes I know that’s an unsubtle blast from my own trumpet, but the whole point of this blog is to sell herbs rather than simply to offer me an ego-trip). Obviously the climate’s wrong for cinnamon, - at the moment at least and the rather weedy, - “weedy” geddit?! excuse for not growing cannabis is that it’s illegal and we actually encourage the police to patrol the area in the vain hope of dissuading burglars and fly tippers. Actually of course, police on the street are as rare here as  a flock of winged dodos speaking at a climate change conference, but we have to keep up the appearance of upright citizenry. What irritates me and why I have blogged on this matter twice,  is the hypocrisy of  being permitted to grow perfectly legally a large number of herbs on which the medieval population  would have got high and possibly dead, but  not cannabis which according to Sullivan’s article is wholly beneficial.  This has more to do with the moral sanctimony of our legislators who feel compelled to ban something, anything at all,  rather than their concern for our health. That said, cannabis has never done me the slightest bit of good and several acquaintances who have smoked it in the past have given every appearance of being half-witted, but that may well have been a genetic problem rather than anything to do with their choice of  recreational drug.

Incidentally words and phrases I can well do without in 2010 are “change”, “footprint”, “carbon”, “climate”, “emissions” and “global warming”, specially today with an icy wind blasting through the nursery

And finally, back to Blake and his sheep, do you think all those jam-makers exuberantly trilling “Jerusalem” realise what a politically incorrect old devil Blake was? “I am black, but O!, my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, but I am black, as if bereav’d of light”  Oh dear! But Blake fans need never fear a knock on the door from the “equality” Gestapo, the guardians of “equality” are all far too busy getting to grips with rap or hiphop or clipclop or whatever, than reading  the works of dead white Christians..