'Garden Stories' film update

Its taken a fair degree of patience(we have none), organization(ditto), and coordination to get to this stage of the film making-process. And it is by no means at an end! After completing a time line for 'Garden Stories', which involved Jo and our camera girl, volunteer gardener and all round unwavering staunch supporter, Claire, sitting through 25 hours of unedited footage and making detailed notes in a small windowless room with a psychotic television prone to psychedelic mood swings, this low low budget magic carpet ride is about to enter the editing suite.




However, we still need to film our Alien sequence, and hopefully a 'live' Guerrilla Gardeners music session in our grade 2 listed 120 year old red ceder greenhouse, slated for the 12th of December. I hope to bring you more about that later, but for now...

Planting bulbs

Nodding Magpies chuckle at our cold expressions on this grey morning and a line of naked Lime trees wraps around us, giving little comfort. With sackfuls of Spring bulbs and a small quiver of spades loaded onto a wheelbarrow we head out into the gardens. In my experience it is always like this when we plant bulbs, short days pinned down under milky skies, a pause between flowers, dampness in the air and waiting for rain. This year we have 4500 bulbs to plant, and if we are lucky the weather conditions will remain stable until the task is complete, cold is one thing but wind chill equals pain. During the winter months we are wrapped up in every available item of clothing we can find, thermals, overalls, long sleeved t-shirts, jumpers, waterproofs, more jackets, fleeces, thermal liner gloves, several layers of socks, woolly hats etc.., anything that will stave off the cold! When it gets into your bones theres nothing that will shift it except a slow slide into a deep hot bath at the end of the day.






So we boldly go, brushing from our shoulders the moats of floating dust, and folding ourselves in half against the ground we push these small memories of flowers beneath a cold blanket of earth. Once in the ground we quickly forget where we have put them, God knows how the Jays and squirrels remember where they have buried their Winter stores! When a days worth of planting is done we scrape thick chocolate wedges of mud from our boots, balancing against spade handles, chatting and laughing in the gathering dusk and checking our watches against black ribbons of crows flying off to their beds. In the warmth of the bothy, cold hands cradle steaming mugs of tea, overalls get kicked under chairs, brief befuddled key moments come and go before we make our weary way out into a world of dark shapes and streaming tail lights.

Heavy Vinyl

Now thats what I call album art!




At the same time as the rise of the New Wave of Heavy Metal I was entering into the chemical imbalance of mid-teens hell, I was, you could say, ripe for the plucking. Even though many would disagree with my early musical leanings, or even pity me, I can safely say that it hasn't harmed me in any way. I now have a wide range of musical tastes and will just about listen to anything. However, round about 1982/83 I was tuning in every week to the Friday Night Rock Show on Radio 1, presided over by Tommy Vance, the flying 'V' of the airwaves.




There's something very wrong with this picture, Rush, circa 2112.




With my index finger poised over the record button on a briefcase sized ghetto blaster I would tape the shows, and when caught short without a piece of paper to hand I scribbled the names of bands down onto a dwindling stock of old beer mats. Uriah Heap, Nazareth, Saxon, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Scorpions, Motorhead, Iron Maiden and many other band names have all drifted down with me through the years. It was also around about this time that I got my first Hi-Fi, a record deck with two small chip board speakers and no amp. I couldn't have been more happy, that is until I got a replacement with a very good amp that I still use to this day. Up until about 1986 the cream on top of this tall beverage of Heavy Metal noise was occupied by just a handful of groups, AC/DC, Scorpions, Deep Purple, Rainbow, Led Zeppelin and Rush were the ones that held my attentions, and Led Zeppelin and Rush sat at the top of this list.



The awesome 'Kashmir' from the monumental 'Physical Graffiti' probably launched a thousand trips to India and beyond.




My friend and I took to wearing denim jackets and tight jeans(ouch!), and sitting in my back yard in the summer months we would painstakingly embroider the names of our favourite bands onto the back of our jackets. How I wish I had that jacket now, lesson number one never get rid of anything that you will regret in hindsight. I can remember having perforated fingertips from pushing the needle through the tough denim fabric, my mum gave me a thimble, threads and plied us both with tea and cake, no doubt making appreciative noises over our handiwork. Fitted in around the edges of our masterpieces were an assortment of patches and pin badges which we bought from a cramped shop in the city, a dubious emporium of leather accoutrements, bullet belts, chains and t-shirts that gave off a keen fragrance of patuli oil and sweat.



Smashed guitars, dodgy set designs, blazing concert halls. Spinal Tap eat your heart out!




I also remember buying records from a shop called Callers Pegasus. This was either an early precursor to Tesco or it was deeply confused about its own identity, as starting on the ground floor you could book a holiday, on the first floor you could buy a sofa and a nice set of table and chairs before ending up on the second floor where a thin crowd of shoppers, mostly men, could be found flicking through racks of vinyl. Etched forever into my memory is the day I first laid eyes on the white outlines of the twentieth century man holding the Red Star of the Solar Federation at bay, a brilliant logo that for some reason was on the back cover of what is arguably the best Rush album, 2112. The lettering and album art was just as important at that time, and recreating those jagged Gothic letters or the swishy looping Whitesnake logo was quite a challenge to a young man when doodling on the inside of a school ring binder. The pimples, the greasy hair, listening to music and staring at record sleeves, in the words of AC/DC, 'Rock n' Roll Ain't Noise Pollution!'.



Lipstick and leather. Discovering new ways to play guitar and break an ankle at the same time.

Another bird stamp.

Stonechat on an Irish stamp.




I love Stonechats, they remind me of sea breezes, beach huts, gorse bushes and sand dunes. I can hear one calling in my head right now.

Rambling on and on...

Birds on stamps. Red Necked Phalarope, Iceland, 1989.




A Red-Eyed Vireo from North America. This one was on The Isles of Scilly, UK, about 20 years ago.



Minus money, car and time I rarely go birding these days, and if I do its likely to be a trip to a nearby park next a Tesco supermarket, with facilities catering to the unwelcome attentions of local vandals. Once every few years I spend a few weeks or months running the gauntlet of dog walkers, horse riders and kamikaze mountain bikers in an attempt to rekindle my semi lapsed interests. The lakes are too deep to attract anything more than a few fishermen, but despite the odds I have spent many hours tiptoeing around the reed fringed edges and surrounding fields in the vain hope that I would turn up something interesting. Unable to shift this need to bird I find myself obsessively counting the gulls on Jesus Green, small flocks of starlings on chimney pots, winter swirls of Redwings and mixed flocks of crows returning to roost over the college. Whenever I here a bird call my head swivels around instinctively, at home the bookshelves groan under the weight of bird books and the fading photos of rare birds that I ticked off in my twitching days lie at the bottom of a messy draw. My head is crawling with memories. Seabirds and waders on the North East coast of England, a kaleidescope of colourful warblers, thousands of Monarch butterflies that drifted across a road like confetti in a season spent following the bird migrations in North America, a Painted Bunting puffing out it's chest feathers against the clean mountain air as it freed sweet melodies upon the green mountain State of Vermont, and many more birdy moments, too many to mention here or even recall. So I hope you will forgive my obsessive compulsions and introspective ramblings, its only me birding from my rocking chair.

Little Red Tractor

Steering towards a tractor sized memory, circa 1976.



On a small fruit farm in Denmark behind shelter belt hedges and a squat farm house, where row after row of trees ran away from the eye, a little red tractor busied to and fro with boxes of ripe apples and plums. It was sometime in the mid Seventies that my family spent a short time here. The kitchen fizzed with flies, Abba played on the stereo and my sister and I were given colourful fly swats to amuse ourselves with. This rural idyll came wrapped in a sweet fog of apples, and if the sun shone, which I'm sure it did, it nestled in a thick crown of orchard hair and filtered through a large jar of marbles that radiated confectionery swirls across the floor.



The present day garden toy equivalent with power steering.



The real treat of these visits was the chance I got to ride pillion on an jolly red Massey-Ferguson. With my tiny hands gripped round the steering wheel, the huge rear wheels biting into the ground, my ears would rattle to the sound of its throaty engine. In a near perfect tractor driving memory I can recall the needle on the speedometer bouncing wildly and ineffectively round the dial as the horizon lurched drunkenly on the end of the tractor's nose. Throughout, the old farmer kept a strong controlling arm on our progress.



I don't want a car, give me a reconditioned Massey-Ferguson FE 35!!



These early driving memories have given me a life long love of tractors that remains undimmed to this day. I now get to play on a little green John Deere, but if I were to win the Lottery tomorrow, the unnecessary luxury that I would treat myself to would be the Massey-Ferguson of my dreams! I'd park it in the driveway, take it on the supermarket run and beetle back and forth on my daily trek to the college gardens. Luckily for the environment I don't think there is any fear of this fantasy becoming a reality!

Stink it up!

By eck' luv y' smell gorgeous! Okay that isn't what the wife said to me when I returned home from work today, but she did comment on the rustic aroma lifting from the fibers of my big woolly jumper. No not manure or wood smoke, but Rosemary. My eager family flocked around me in the dim glow of the kitchen for a good sniff as a wintery burst of hail pebbled against the windows. It's at this time of year that we chop back the Rosemary hedges that we have planted around the college properties. Halving them in size by just under a metre using a pair of hand shears is vigorous work, and it kept me warm for most of the day in the cold wind. Every year when we do this job we manage to draw people in by their noses, screeching to a sudden halt on their bicycles or causing them to perform abrupt u turns on the pavement. Grabbing at the scattered trimmings on the ground and bundling them together, they ask if they may have some for the pot, eyes all a glimmer! Yes, yes and yes we say again and again. One year, after giving an old overgrown Rosemary a harsh prune, I trussed up the trimmings like a Christmas turkey before strapping them to my back. Wandering off into town to do a spot of Christmas shopping, I ended up in an art and crafts shop, Primavera, opposite Kings College. As I walked in I became aware of the customers stares and delighted comments as the shop filled with a heady vapor of fresh Rosemary. It wasn't long before the manager of the shop approached me and asked if he could have the Rosemary off my back for his Christmas window display, in return he would give me a nice hand made coffee cup. One early Christmas present checked off the list and I was back out on the streets of Cambridge shuffling along under strings of sparkling lights with a triumphant smile on my face. If you can't find any stray rustic gardeners with large bunches of fresh Rosemary about their person, then why not grow some, it makes a very nice hedge and it grows quite quickly. Or Neal's Yard have some nice products to put you in a rustic frame of mind.