Crickets and a train, oh my!

Don't ask me how I find these but I will send you in the right direction to listen to them from time to time. I love listening to ambient field recordings, found sounds from the environment that surrounds us. I have managed to hit pay dirt with a couple of sites. First up is The Quiet American, enthusiasts from around the world send in their own recordings and post them here under the heading 'One minute Vacations'. There is an audio clip of a steam train moving through the Australian outback, find it here, dated November 5th, 2007. I advise you to listen with headphones, you only get a third of the intended audio without them. There is a PayPal donate button at the Quiet American website if you wish to contribute. Enjoy!

moon with a view.

Superman prepares Supergirl for a little get away from it all 'one on one' time in Superman/Supergirl- Maelstrom no.1. I like to look at isolated comic book panels, giving each one time on it's own. I have friend that I hardly ever see anymore who now paints birds for a living. The warning signs were already there in his teens, whenever he came round to my house he would take field guides and art books from the shelves and spend hours just staring at each individual plate, eating up and devouring every last feather on the page. It was one of those things that I got from hours spent in the field birdwatching, the joy of exercising the eye, to really notice things, each slightest movement and detail mapped by the habit of constantly scanning. Even now I can't help checking rooftops, bushes, trees, fence posts and telephone wires for birds. This panel got me wondering how superhero capes would react to the lack of gravity in space? The artist here, Phil Noto, has cunningly framed the Earth with the curl of Supergirl's cape, maybe signaling to her regret for mistakes made and her need to care for the Earth's inhabitants?



Something I haven't done for a while is to set up my telescope for a spot of moon watching. The next full moon is on the 13th of November, so if the skies are clear and the light from an infinite number of galaxies wraps around the staggered chimney pots of countless silver rooftops, I will decamp to the back garden and scan its bright benevolent features for signs of life!


My favourite Tin Tin adventure, and rocket!



Panel to panel from The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite no.1, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba. Incidentally there is a new series of The Umbrella Academy due to hit the comic book shelves very soon.

The tale of the fox that fell in love with a young monk. A lovely story from Neil Gaiman in the Sandman series called 'The Dream Hunters'. This is from issue no.1 which came out last week. The art is by P. Craig Russell.


To finish off this little post on moon related bits and bobs, try out this track by Mike Oldfield,
'Moonlight Shadow' was released as a single in 1983, from the album 'Crises', which I bought at the time. It has a green moon at the centre of the vinyl and I remember playing this track over and over, aaah, such soft innocent times!

Invisible landscapes

In the last few days a sludgy gloom has descended, temperatures have risen and a fine rain has been blowing gently across us in misty skirts, feeling somewhat like being attacked by a giant atomizer. All the lights in the main college buildings have been switched on all day, making the concrete glow and emphasizing the perpetual gloom outside. This slide into the first half of winter has an interesting effect on the gardeners who at the best of times feel like ruminants in the landscape. Melting back between the dark stands of trees, in November our shadows vanish and the wild birds and animals lose their fear of us. Heads down, the office workers scuttle from one warm building to another, and thrown into relief we undergo a mental shift, entering into a northern European mind set. We have no choice but to embrace the bare minimalism of a garden stripped down to its angular framework. Strange static squelches and whistles leek through from space as we spin the dial to re-tune to our internal landscape, where daydreams float under the movements of winter birds, and bright contrails that dart across the globe threaten to break the spell. It's not for everyone this internal journey, but I have already half welcomed its arrival by coating my snow white ipod with an electro ambient gloss of coolness. Beamed into the bright heart of my living pod are the following artists... Tangerine Dream-'Dream Sequence', Sigur Ross-'Takk', Boards Of Canada -'Music Has The Right To Children', Trentemøller -'The Last Resort', Brian Eno-'Music For Airports' and Northaunt with the tracks that I have so far, 'Horizons' and 'Autumn Cold'. As the atmosphere thins and the emptiness of space presses down on the garden, headphones are de-rigeur this season!

A place of departure.

Each of Jo Tunmer's paintings wakes the senses to moments lost in time, and allows us the chance to daydream, and to travel to places half recalled that you feel certain that you've been to before. That's the wonderful thing about Jo's work, they can be all of our lost moments.


Standing at the point of our departure, she captures the essence of being in the landscape, physically connects us to it, and at times leads us along diffuse paths and roads that play with a core need that exists in all of us, to see what lies beyond the horizon.



It is no surprise that her paintings are finding an ever growing band of devotees on both sides of the Atlantic. If you would like to find out more, then visit Jo's website here.

This notes for you!

Sharon Foo, from the The Raveonettes. See the original source of this image here.



During the course of an average day at work I usually have my headphones jammed permanently onto my head, occasionally I push aside the left or right ear piece to include myself in conversation, but at times it can feel like I've been caught in a fish bowl moment, mouths moving in silent animated discussion whilst I struggle to untangle all the various ambient noises. Tractors, traffic, music, podcasts, conversation and birdsong all clamour for my attention. A quiet life in the garden, more often than not it ain't! Because I spend so much time listening to my i pod, I find myself getting a bit bored with it's content, and as a result when I link it up to the mother ship it's usually for slimming down purposes and not for uploading some groovy new addition to the library. All is not lost though, as one of the benefits of familiarity is that there are always a few weightless gems that bobble up above the rest. Some of the recent highlights warming my garden head space are Will Johnson's album 'South San Gabriel', Andrew Bird's 'Armchair Apocrypha', and The Raveonettes 'Chain Gang Of Love' and their latest offering 'Lust, Lust, Lust', which came with a funky pair of 3D spectacles! This band has to be one of my favourites at the moment. They are a Danish rock & roll twosome who sing sweet harmonies over intense surf rock fuzzy guitar noise. They blend 50s and 60s rock & roll with the darker sounds of The Velvet Underground. They've got that sugar and salt spitting bubblegum Pulp Fiction that I like. I can imagine listening to this on an evening spent reading some old 'Strange Tales' comics. I say treat yourself today, everyone should have at least one Raveonettes album in their CD stack.


They don't make them like they used to. Find more of the above here




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Cloudbreak sequence!

The perfect wave in the sky.

Big hollow barrel in the sky!

Closing out!

Boom!, the wave pounds into the impact zone.


I took this series of photos last week over the gardens. For those not in the know, there is a famous surf spot in Fiji called 'Cloudbreak'.

Winter came early

An early end to the late summer tub displays. Salvias still in full bloom.

Carnage, waiting to be thrown on the compost heap.

Chopped back and ready for winter hibernation.

Tools of the trade.

Beautiful blooms going to waste.
Piled high.
Tractor loaded and ready for the off.



Embers of autumn fires lie scattered on the ground, not of the wood and smoke variety, but of the floral kind. Sheets of rain and hail last week gave way to clearing skies and tumbling temperatures. It was as if time had stood still, rain drops had frozen mid drip to my handlebars, the brakes had seized up and the gears wouldn't work, which meant that my legs spun round furiously on the pedals. Nowhere feels the change in seasons more acutely than in the garden, so the race is now on to bring in our frost tender plants before they get decimated. In previous years the Salvias, Dahlias, Daturas and Bananas kept on thrilling right to the end of November, but an early frost and forecast for a series of frosts has left us scrambling. What a shame. Ripping out our large tub displays that were still in full bloom was heart breaking. The greenhouse was cleared ready to receive these delicate souls, and so we have no choice now but to embrace the winter. The heater in the bothy has been cranked up and I've pulled out my Russian hat from storage. Winter related tales are now in the offing.