We were once on holiday in Ireland and being a pretty weird family we went to visit the house of a famous Witch called Biddy Early. We all joked about how none of us believed in Witches and how odd it was that people would still come here in the 20th century and pin little notes all over the place asking for her help. After all it was just a run down shack and she had been dead for a long, long time.
When we were done, we took the car down onto Inch beach on Dingle isand, My sister was learning to drive so she and my dad went off to practice in the car. While driving around the beach they found an expensive camera, and re-united it with it's owner.
After she had driven around for a while they parked up on the sand and we all went swimming, still talking about witches and Biddy Early and Irish superstition.
When we got back to the car, the tide started to come in and we couldn't find the car keys.
We searched everywhere and they just were nowhere to be found.
While my mum freeked out, the sun started to go down and storm clouds gathered on the horizon. While we searched in vain, the sea just got closer and closer and rougher and rougher.
Just as we were about to go hire a farmer to tow us off the beach, My mum said, "I guess this is what we get for messing with Biddy Early..."
Just then, out of nowhere the owner of the camera we'd found walked up to us with the car keys.
It turned out that my sister had accidentally thrown them into the camera case just as my dad had shut it. I've never seen my parents so relieved.
That night we went out for a fish and chip supper and around the table we all agreed, never to make fun of Witches again.
Thursday 19 August 2010
Tuesday 13 July 2010
While I'm at it...
I might as well put a link up to this
It's called When in Rome,
I wrote it with David Pilling and I did all the voices, quite a lot of them are Scottish and at least one of them is female. I was young then and thought that writing a sit-com would be easy. This was my second ever pilot. I've written a few more now but I've never recorded any of them.
Neither Dave nor I had ever seen Chelmsford 123 we figured the idea had 'never been done'. Classic mistake.
It's called When in Rome,
I wrote it with David Pilling and I did all the voices, quite a lot of them are Scottish and at least one of them is female. I was young then and thought that writing a sit-com would be easy. This was my second ever pilot. I've written a few more now but I've never recorded any of them.
Neither Dave nor I had ever seen Chelmsford 123 we figured the idea had 'never been done'. Classic mistake.
Monday 12 July 2010
3 Audio Stories.
I put these up today with the same trepidation that one might put up naked baby photo's. I hope you enjoy them.
Steven's Baby
Probably the best of the three if I'm honest. But I haven't heard it in a long time. Just the opening music makes me feel weird and then I have to turn it off before the talking starts because it freaks me out.
The actress was Lisa Coleman, on Casualty, she played 'Nurse Jude' I think she is just perfect for this. I never wrote to thank her for the great job she did. I may try and track her down and send her a link... on second thoughts she might get mad and ask me for money.
Hidden Depths
This is the most recent to be taken on, I had to cut it down from a story that was originally a BlogPost on this very site... if you are really bored one day you could compare the two. The actor Joe Sims, reads this one. He's in this, he is Ralph. He's Bristolian Ya'll. Show some love!
Boxing Smart
This story ended up on radio Somerset Sound after placing in a competition (either the Wells or the Frome Festival of Literature, I forget which) as you can tell it's a first person narrative about a boxer who beats his wife. It's read by middle aged actress Lois Harbinson. When they played Celein Dion at the end... I almost cried.
Watch out for the 'Hemmingwayesque Short Sentences...' (The quote is from a later rejection letter. If you're reading this. I forgive you.)
Steven's Baby
Probably the best of the three if I'm honest. But I haven't heard it in a long time. Just the opening music makes me feel weird and then I have to turn it off before the talking starts because it freaks me out.
The actress was Lisa Coleman, on Casualty, she played 'Nurse Jude' I think she is just perfect for this. I never wrote to thank her for the great job she did. I may try and track her down and send her a link... on second thoughts she might get mad and ask me for money.
Hidden Depths
This is the most recent to be taken on, I had to cut it down from a story that was originally a BlogPost on this very site... if you are really bored one day you could compare the two. The actor Joe Sims, reads this one. He's in this, he is Ralph. He's Bristolian Ya'll. Show some love!
Boxing Smart
This story ended up on radio Somerset Sound after placing in a competition (either the Wells or the Frome Festival of Literature, I forget which) as you can tell it's a first person narrative about a boxer who beats his wife. It's read by middle aged actress Lois Harbinson. When they played Celein Dion at the end... I almost cried.
Watch out for the 'Hemmingwayesque Short Sentences...' (The quote is from a later rejection letter. If you're reading this. I forgive you.)
Wednesday 5 May 2010
Collection Pt 1
We had hoped for a sunny day, but when we woke up that morning it was as if we even the sky had decided it couldn’t be arsed. A flat grey coat of emulsion where there might have been brilliant blue, a dramatic sunset or the intimidating metallic purple of a storm. With just the grey, it is hard for us to get out of bed. Yesterday was a long journey, we arrived here late. I had been driving for three hours and was tired enough to watch Too Fast Too Furious on her grandmothers tiny television, Ali wasn't so she turned it off at about midnight and we went to go to sleep.
Waking up now our bodies ache from the unfamiliarity of a strange mattress. These Springs have not formed to our body. These springs have adjusted to the shape of someone else body. Ali's grandmother, Jane, has been dead for four months now. This room still smells like her. Still contains all her stuff.
We get out of her bed. There is no food in the house, we have tea with no milk. There is a supermarket over the road but it’s Sunday so it will not be open until 10am. It is 9.
We decide to make a start, that we can go get some supplies in an hour.
From the kitchen I take a feather duster on the end of a stick that I will use to sweep cobwebs out of the way.
We head out of the back door. No one has been here for a while except the gardener who comes once a week, a pair of wood pigeons that have been living on a window ledge explode into the sky, with a noise like a shotgun, I swear one of them gives me a dirty look.
There is a conservatory/greenhouse full of cacti, her entire collection, well over sixty different kinds. They will have to be looked after by someone. It would be a shame for such and extensive collection to go to waste.
We walk past it onto the lawn. A fat baby blackbird darts from cover and bashes into the chain link fence. Dazed it takes up a new hiding place beneath a shrub and watches us nervously as we proceed towards the end of the garden. We cannot see the birds parents, but we leave it alone.
The garden looks perfect. I guess that Ali’s uncle is paying the gardener so that when the time comes for us to sell the house it hasn’t fallen into a state of disrepair.
We press on towards the garage. Opening the doors we see a five-foot pile of Boxes, Tubs and furniture covered with tarps. There is not enough light for us to work with so we open the double doors at the other end of the garage, where cars would normally come in. Spiders fall from the rapidly expanding gap between to the two doors. They crawl off to find new dark places in which to hide.
There is a lot of stuff in here that got stored away it has come from West Wales to Toddington in Bedfordshire and then all the way up here to Brandon, Suffolk. We are going to take some of it to Bath and then post bits of it all over the world.
Even without the memories attached, the journey it has taken to get here already imbues every dusty item with some kind of fetishist significance. If you wanted to you could picture their journey as a five dimensional graph love knot, where the past left is behind us like neon snail trails, like the matted threads that spew from the backsides of these wandering spiders. I can see our paths and the paths of the contents of these boxes tied up together in the complex web of our shared history. I see the moment when I lured Ali away from Wales, away from her mother and all this stuff. I see her mother already disabled, mostly wheelchair bound, moving to be near Uncle Rob, I see her getting worse, having a fall, having a stroke, having to be moved into a home. I see this whole pile of stuff pulling in tight and leaving a trail away from the rest of us and coming here into the dark were it has waited for us to return and collect it, bring it back into the light.
We must be rational and strong in the face of emotion. We will objectively look through all of this and catagorise. We will take some of it home to our already crowded flat. Some will be given away to charity shops. Some will be photographed with a digital camera. Some we will just throw away. This is going to be complicated.
The first hour is spent just assessing what we are getting into, before heading over to the supermarket and buying sandwhich-building materials, some ham, some lettuce, a Jar of pickled Gerkins (sweet dill) and a pack of four mini bagettes. We eat them in the kitchen, not wanting to mess up her grandmothers carpets.
Anyone who buy’s this house will undoubtedly replace the carpets inside of a week, but that’s not the point. It is the principle of the thing, Jane kept this house spotless for half a century, we are not about to ruin that legacy in a single weekend.
With our bellies full we head back the shed and, applying the hand-and-fast plaster-principle, start with the hardest bag; soft toys.
Teddy bears and puppies and dinosaurs from Ali’s childhood piled up like an orgy wrapped in a plastic bag. We are looking for two in particular. Miss Bunny and an old pink bear that Ali's mother sometimes asks for.
Both Ali and I can be ridiculous about this kind of thing. Irrational.
We are adults that keep soft toy’s in our bedroom. We have new ones. They have names and personalities. This is a side of our lives that we do not often share with other people. Back home we have the Pigs (little Pig, Pig Wigglington and Singing Pig.) We have Goat, a Squirrel and a bush baby. We have the big white Snow-God, We have Clangers and frogs and polar bears. We even have duck billed platypus and an akidna. We look after them, we know them all well. We don't have kid's, We'd love a dog but live in rented accommodation.
The soft toys here however have suffered from years of neglect. They look like props for an NSPCC fund-raising advert. The worst casualty is a beanbag frog that once contained dried lentils. Mice have ripped him apart, he is now just shreds of cloth. Mice have attacked the other bears also. They have ripped open seams in order to get to the stuffing. They do not discriminate between hands and bodies and faces. Childhood friends appear from black bags like victims of torture. I am reminded of one a particularly cruel children's book. It is a story about a teddy bear. Abandoned and Unloved for years in an attick and then suddenly overjoyed at a reunion with its owner, because it knows that it will be loved again. Ali is holding it together fine.
To me, what the mice have done seems like wanton destruction, it is insult to injury. they piss and shit on everything and then tear it apart, but I am judging them too harshly. What they are doing is pulling out stuffing to make their nests. This knowledge makes it easier to deal with. I can re-frame and step outside of myself. Actual living things have benefitted at the expense of what I have to keep reminding myself are just funny shaped pillows.
Mrs Bunny is ok. We also find the pink bear. It is no longer pink but at least it still has it’s face.
We separate the toys into three piles. Silently, without telling ali I tell the middle pile that they will be going to a charity shop where they will be bought and given to children and loved again. I make them a promise. In particular I make this promise to Big Dog, a birthday present which I gave to Ali around the time that we first got together. It’s a small thing but it makes it ok. I am re-rewriting that children’s book. I think that maybe I have misremembered the children’s book anyway. I think in the end the bear comes down from the attic to be given to his own owner’s daughter. I'm pretty sure that in the book there were no mice.
With the bears out the way we are able to press on to what we think will be easier tasks, vases, knickknacks, functional crockery. Every object drips with nostalgic memory.
A lot of it is broken, that is easy, it can be thrown away. We throw away a busted doll’s house made by her father. We throw away the moth-eaten head of a stuffed impala once mounted ironically on the living-room wall. There are dozens of boxes too small to have any really practical use. There are Tin’s and miniature teacups. There are plastic cars and metal soldiers. Why would anybody buy these? I ask myself.
I start to become shocked by the amount of useless frippery a person can collect in a single lifetime. I find figurines, small handmade sculptures and costume jewelry I picture them all on shelves.
I get an image in my mind of my own shelves at home. Of a porcelain Indian running duck with a ribbon around it’s neck. A carved wooden dolphin. A logic puzzle with some of the pieces missing. I start to wonder about what it means to be human, why we choose to spend so much time and energy making shelf fillers, stocking fillers and ultimately landfillers. What will the historians of the future make of all of this. They will say, no doubt, that it has Ritualistic Significance which is what they say when they can't figure out what something is for. I wonder if any other animal collects objects that have no practical purpose other than to express their owner’s personality. I wonder if cave paintings just made the place more 'homely'.
Somewhere elbow deep in the mess I get the idea that the bags of ‘Sulvanian Families’ stuff we keep finding might be valuable. That perhaps we could sell them on Ebay. Sulvanian Familes were like Doll’s houses for Animals. Ali used to collect them, she has a doll's river barge in which resides a family of otters. All it’s parts are there; that has to be worth something right? Even if it’s not we can clean it up and give it to my neices.
When Ali was a girl she also collected Trolls. I start to put each troll we find in a bag I am convinced that someone out there must still be collecting these, that they must hold some value to someone. I throw chipped art objects into the trash, and mass produced neon-haired trolls into a pillowcase to take home. Because they can be grouped together, because they are easily identifiable it seems worth-while to collect them. 100 dead plastic faces in a bag.
We strike a seam of artwork. Several portfolios of both Ali’s father’s and Ali’s Mother’s work. We knew that this would be here; we know that we cannot keep all of it, but Ali has a plan, but the plan is going to take a long time. Carefully we put all the art all to one side and break for lunch.
I decide that we have done well and that as such we deserve a nice dinner, that we should walk down the road into town and get a pub lunch. I think it’s a good idea for us to have some down-time let people wait on us for a while. Away from the dust and the spiders.
Ali doesn’t want this to turn into a wasted afternoon so we are to make it as quick as possible. It’s Sunday, It’s 3pm, nowhere is serving lunch anymore, we walk a mile and a half before catching the very end of a serving at a roadside pub. It’s a good lunch, meat and gravy and Yorkshire puddings. Our waitress clearly wants to go home already. We talk about how we are making good progress how the weather is turning, that it looks like blue skies ahead. We feel that we have broken the back of the thing.
When we come to pay we find out that the pub's card machine is broken, I am told that I will have to walk another half mile back to the centre of town and it’s only working cash-point. I am conscious that all of this is taking up valuable time as well as energy and strength. I am pissed off about it but I hold it in as this whole lunch thing was my idea.
Instead of going all the way into town I pop into an Aldi which is quite close by. Despite being stuffed I pick up a bag of Haribo Cola-bottles and £20 cashback. When I return to the bar, Ali is talking to the barman and an alcoholic ex-hippie. I tell them about going to Aldi instead of the cashpoint, the hippie pipes up, ‘and that’s all you bought… they told me I had to spend over a fiver’ I look at him. He looks at me. He had long hair once but now due to male pattern baldness it’s just a curtain now around the back of his head. He has the loose grin of a drinker, rough skin and rougher clothes. For reasons unexplained I’m looking pretty good, short hair, clean shaven, young and affluent, who are they to know it's a sham.
‘yeah they were gonna make me do that’ I say ‘ but they decided they liked my style’
I look down my nose at the Hippy, half smiling, telling him with my eyes that I think he looks like shit. The barman stiffles a laugh.
‘See you later guys’ I say swanning out the door with my beautiful young wife in tow.
‘Not if I see you first’ says the Hippy. I'll most likely never see him again.
Waking up now our bodies ache from the unfamiliarity of a strange mattress. These Springs have not formed to our body. These springs have adjusted to the shape of someone else body. Ali's grandmother, Jane, has been dead for four months now. This room still smells like her. Still contains all her stuff.
We get out of her bed. There is no food in the house, we have tea with no milk. There is a supermarket over the road but it’s Sunday so it will not be open until 10am. It is 9.
We decide to make a start, that we can go get some supplies in an hour.
From the kitchen I take a feather duster on the end of a stick that I will use to sweep cobwebs out of the way.
We head out of the back door. No one has been here for a while except the gardener who comes once a week, a pair of wood pigeons that have been living on a window ledge explode into the sky, with a noise like a shotgun, I swear one of them gives me a dirty look.
There is a conservatory/greenhouse full of cacti, her entire collection, well over sixty different kinds. They will have to be looked after by someone. It would be a shame for such and extensive collection to go to waste.
We walk past it onto the lawn. A fat baby blackbird darts from cover and bashes into the chain link fence. Dazed it takes up a new hiding place beneath a shrub and watches us nervously as we proceed towards the end of the garden. We cannot see the birds parents, but we leave it alone.
The garden looks perfect. I guess that Ali’s uncle is paying the gardener so that when the time comes for us to sell the house it hasn’t fallen into a state of disrepair.
We press on towards the garage. Opening the doors we see a five-foot pile of Boxes, Tubs and furniture covered with tarps. There is not enough light for us to work with so we open the double doors at the other end of the garage, where cars would normally come in. Spiders fall from the rapidly expanding gap between to the two doors. They crawl off to find new dark places in which to hide.
There is a lot of stuff in here that got stored away it has come from West Wales to Toddington in Bedfordshire and then all the way up here to Brandon, Suffolk. We are going to take some of it to Bath and then post bits of it all over the world.
Even without the memories attached, the journey it has taken to get here already imbues every dusty item with some kind of fetishist significance. If you wanted to you could picture their journey as a five dimensional graph love knot, where the past left is behind us like neon snail trails, like the matted threads that spew from the backsides of these wandering spiders. I can see our paths and the paths of the contents of these boxes tied up together in the complex web of our shared history. I see the moment when I lured Ali away from Wales, away from her mother and all this stuff. I see her mother already disabled, mostly wheelchair bound, moving to be near Uncle Rob, I see her getting worse, having a fall, having a stroke, having to be moved into a home. I see this whole pile of stuff pulling in tight and leaving a trail away from the rest of us and coming here into the dark were it has waited for us to return and collect it, bring it back into the light.
We must be rational and strong in the face of emotion. We will objectively look through all of this and catagorise. We will take some of it home to our already crowded flat. Some will be given away to charity shops. Some will be photographed with a digital camera. Some we will just throw away. This is going to be complicated.
The first hour is spent just assessing what we are getting into, before heading over to the supermarket and buying sandwhich-building materials, some ham, some lettuce, a Jar of pickled Gerkins (sweet dill) and a pack of four mini bagettes. We eat them in the kitchen, not wanting to mess up her grandmothers carpets.
Anyone who buy’s this house will undoubtedly replace the carpets inside of a week, but that’s not the point. It is the principle of the thing, Jane kept this house spotless for half a century, we are not about to ruin that legacy in a single weekend.
With our bellies full we head back the shed and, applying the hand-and-fast plaster-principle, start with the hardest bag; soft toys.
Teddy bears and puppies and dinosaurs from Ali’s childhood piled up like an orgy wrapped in a plastic bag. We are looking for two in particular. Miss Bunny and an old pink bear that Ali's mother sometimes asks for.
Both Ali and I can be ridiculous about this kind of thing. Irrational.
We are adults that keep soft toy’s in our bedroom. We have new ones. They have names and personalities. This is a side of our lives that we do not often share with other people. Back home we have the Pigs (little Pig, Pig Wigglington and Singing Pig.) We have Goat, a Squirrel and a bush baby. We have the big white Snow-God, We have Clangers and frogs and polar bears. We even have duck billed platypus and an akidna. We look after them, we know them all well. We don't have kid's, We'd love a dog but live in rented accommodation.
The soft toys here however have suffered from years of neglect. They look like props for an NSPCC fund-raising advert. The worst casualty is a beanbag frog that once contained dried lentils. Mice have ripped him apart, he is now just shreds of cloth. Mice have attacked the other bears also. They have ripped open seams in order to get to the stuffing. They do not discriminate between hands and bodies and faces. Childhood friends appear from black bags like victims of torture. I am reminded of one a particularly cruel children's book. It is a story about a teddy bear. Abandoned and Unloved for years in an attick and then suddenly overjoyed at a reunion with its owner, because it knows that it will be loved again. Ali is holding it together fine.
To me, what the mice have done seems like wanton destruction, it is insult to injury. they piss and shit on everything and then tear it apart, but I am judging them too harshly. What they are doing is pulling out stuffing to make their nests. This knowledge makes it easier to deal with. I can re-frame and step outside of myself. Actual living things have benefitted at the expense of what I have to keep reminding myself are just funny shaped pillows.
Mrs Bunny is ok. We also find the pink bear. It is no longer pink but at least it still has it’s face.
We separate the toys into three piles. Silently, without telling ali I tell the middle pile that they will be going to a charity shop where they will be bought and given to children and loved again. I make them a promise. In particular I make this promise to Big Dog, a birthday present which I gave to Ali around the time that we first got together. It’s a small thing but it makes it ok. I am re-rewriting that children’s book. I think that maybe I have misremembered the children’s book anyway. I think in the end the bear comes down from the attic to be given to his own owner’s daughter. I'm pretty sure that in the book there were no mice.
With the bears out the way we are able to press on to what we think will be easier tasks, vases, knickknacks, functional crockery. Every object drips with nostalgic memory.
A lot of it is broken, that is easy, it can be thrown away. We throw away a busted doll’s house made by her father. We throw away the moth-eaten head of a stuffed impala once mounted ironically on the living-room wall. There are dozens of boxes too small to have any really practical use. There are Tin’s and miniature teacups. There are plastic cars and metal soldiers. Why would anybody buy these? I ask myself.
I start to become shocked by the amount of useless frippery a person can collect in a single lifetime. I find figurines, small handmade sculptures and costume jewelry I picture them all on shelves.
I get an image in my mind of my own shelves at home. Of a porcelain Indian running duck with a ribbon around it’s neck. A carved wooden dolphin. A logic puzzle with some of the pieces missing. I start to wonder about what it means to be human, why we choose to spend so much time and energy making shelf fillers, stocking fillers and ultimately landfillers. What will the historians of the future make of all of this. They will say, no doubt, that it has Ritualistic Significance which is what they say when they can't figure out what something is for. I wonder if any other animal collects objects that have no practical purpose other than to express their owner’s personality. I wonder if cave paintings just made the place more 'homely'.
Somewhere elbow deep in the mess I get the idea that the bags of ‘Sulvanian Families’ stuff we keep finding might be valuable. That perhaps we could sell them on Ebay. Sulvanian Familes were like Doll’s houses for Animals. Ali used to collect them, she has a doll's river barge in which resides a family of otters. All it’s parts are there; that has to be worth something right? Even if it’s not we can clean it up and give it to my neices.
When Ali was a girl she also collected Trolls. I start to put each troll we find in a bag I am convinced that someone out there must still be collecting these, that they must hold some value to someone. I throw chipped art objects into the trash, and mass produced neon-haired trolls into a pillowcase to take home. Because they can be grouped together, because they are easily identifiable it seems worth-while to collect them. 100 dead plastic faces in a bag.
We strike a seam of artwork. Several portfolios of both Ali’s father’s and Ali’s Mother’s work. We knew that this would be here; we know that we cannot keep all of it, but Ali has a plan, but the plan is going to take a long time. Carefully we put all the art all to one side and break for lunch.
I decide that we have done well and that as such we deserve a nice dinner, that we should walk down the road into town and get a pub lunch. I think it’s a good idea for us to have some down-time let people wait on us for a while. Away from the dust and the spiders.
Ali doesn’t want this to turn into a wasted afternoon so we are to make it as quick as possible. It’s Sunday, It’s 3pm, nowhere is serving lunch anymore, we walk a mile and a half before catching the very end of a serving at a roadside pub. It’s a good lunch, meat and gravy and Yorkshire puddings. Our waitress clearly wants to go home already. We talk about how we are making good progress how the weather is turning, that it looks like blue skies ahead. We feel that we have broken the back of the thing.
When we come to pay we find out that the pub's card machine is broken, I am told that I will have to walk another half mile back to the centre of town and it’s only working cash-point. I am conscious that all of this is taking up valuable time as well as energy and strength. I am pissed off about it but I hold it in as this whole lunch thing was my idea.
Instead of going all the way into town I pop into an Aldi which is quite close by. Despite being stuffed I pick up a bag of Haribo Cola-bottles and £20 cashback. When I return to the bar, Ali is talking to the barman and an alcoholic ex-hippie. I tell them about going to Aldi instead of the cashpoint, the hippie pipes up, ‘and that’s all you bought… they told me I had to spend over a fiver’ I look at him. He looks at me. He had long hair once but now due to male pattern baldness it’s just a curtain now around the back of his head. He has the loose grin of a drinker, rough skin and rougher clothes. For reasons unexplained I’m looking pretty good, short hair, clean shaven, young and affluent, who are they to know it's a sham.
‘yeah they were gonna make me do that’ I say ‘ but they decided they liked my style’
I look down my nose at the Hippy, half smiling, telling him with my eyes that I think he looks like shit. The barman stiffles a laugh.
‘See you later guys’ I say swanning out the door with my beautiful young wife in tow.
‘Not if I see you first’ says the Hippy. I'll most likely never see him again.
Friday 23 April 2010
Tinnitus
You don’t want to meet at your house. In hushed tones over the telephone you tell me to meet you at Temple Meads train station; that I will find you in the newsagent, leafing through Dog Lover Magazine. You give me a password. I will say, ‘I like dogs, but my wife can’t stand the smell’ and then you will reply, ‘She wouldn’t like mine. It really hums.’
It doesn’t quite go down like that; during some dreamlike reflection on the scrolling greenbelt between Bath and Bristol I forget the password. Luckily I still remember the meeting place.
Temple Meads Station is Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s gateway to the West Country. There are posters on the walls that carry his name. Apparently he built it in a complex expanding curve, I am told that no two girders in the lofted Iron ceiling are exactly the same size. Looking up I don’t quite believe it, but I am impressed.
This building is a Cathedral to the steam engine. A statement of futuristic intent from a founding father of the industrial revolution; a dignified grandfather to Modernity; a distant ape-like ancestor of our complex and imploding world.
Finding you in the magazine stand I put my hand on your shoulder and you jump. I say, ‘Hi, you must be the hum guy’ and you look at me suspiciously and herd me out of the newsagent into the ticket hall. With your hand on the small of my back we move swiftly out the automatic doors and into the nearest taxi. You’re about sixty-five years old and look pretty much as I pictured you from your voice on the phone. A gruff, rough skinned Bristolian Silverback. Although you are the older one, you are clearly nervous. I am having a hard time not being amused by this. I know that I am not from the CIA, I know, well at least I am pretty sure, that no one from the CIA is in the least bit interested in what you have to show me.
‘So,’ I say ‘Do you want to explain what we’re going to see or what?’
‘Not here’ you say and flash you’re eyes towards the driver. I catch his eye in the rear-view mirror and give him a wink for good measure. You don’t like this. First I screw up the password and now I’m signalling to the driver, this whole thing was a bad idea. It was a risk… but for a bona fide journalist, even a small time hack like myself, to be the least bit interested in your work… It’s worth it.
You believe you are showing me something important, perhaps it’s the most important thing in the world, This is Watergate territory… you believe that I might be the spark that starts the fire that sets the whole world burning. You believe, you hope.
I sit opposite you in the taxi looking at your face, trying to figure you out. Perhaps you drank too much and it went to your head, perhaps you are just looking for meaning. Condescending snob that I am, I paint a picture of your life. I see you lifting and carying, banging in rivets, pressing buttons that cause large pieces of machinery to press down onto hot steel. Later I see you walking between jets of steam on the factory floor. You have risen through the ranks and are overseeing a shrinking human workforce and a growing army of droids. I see you sitting at home, whiskey in hand; At first you are comforted by the fact that you are needed, that you are an important cog in beautiful machine, and then slowly as the years pass, you start to question exactly what it is this machine is doing. The inhuman pulse of metal and heat that has chewed up your friends, your family, you.
In between decades of soap opera and cigarettes, you watch a number of nature documentaries about lonely animals in shrinking forests and you identify with them. Every year you make more and more cars and you see charts and graffs that rise like skyscrapers from a virgin tropical coastline. And then when you least expect it to, the graff drops and the whole thing, in all it’s immovable metallic glory, fucks off to china and leaves you standing by the roadside wondering what the hell just happened.
I am silently singing an unwritten Bruce Springsteen classic. My version of your life.
You look at me and you see it all, a college-prick with a notepad, some well worn clichés and an over-active imagination, no experience in the real world.
You tell the cabbie to stop, give him a Tenner and then encourage me to walk with you. We are near the Broadwalk Shopping Centre. We take a right off The Wells Road and head into a no-frills council estate. Some of the houses are boarded up, some are pebble dashed or comprised of raw breezeblocks. There is a pub flying England flags. even in a world cup year, I read unwritten words in the red and white ‘violent patriotism... Us and Them’. Even as a white male, English as far back as I can count, they make me uncomfortable. I get the unnerving feeling that pink skinned liberals like myself are just as foreign as anyone else. My swagger is all gone.
I had thought that it would be fun to humour you, that there would be some hilarious material to be had for my blog.
What was it you told me on the phone?
Something about a noise you could hear in your head, something about the government. The Bristol Hum: You said you knew what it was and you could prove it. You told me to Google it and I did.
I learned all about it, and I laughed while did. I mentioned you to my wife as ‘the craziest caller I’d had that day’. I felt guilty even as I did it. I felt like I was betraying you. Betraying your naive trust.
You get a key out of your pocket and open the front door to your flat. You live on the ground floor of a council house. The front door just gets us into the stair well. There is a rusty bike with no wheels. I watch you search around for seccond key. While you’re searching you drop your informant persona, candidly you tell me about your upstairs neighbour. He is a tosser, He is always playing his music and stomping around like an elephant. You say that when it’s not music it’s porn, at full volume in the middle of the day. You tell me that if you can catch him you’ll ring his scrawny neck. We step inside.
The room is dark and brown, an old two-man sofa with wooden arms sits against one wall and a TV close to the other. There is one of those gas fires with a grid of ceramic bobbles. The kind they always replace on 60 minute makeover. Where the coffee table would normally be is a machine that appears to be feeding a roll of paper from one box to another while a needle skips up and down across it. ‘Got one in every room.’ You tell me. ‘It measures, tremors and that.’
I am blanc.
You look at me like I’m stupid. Like maybe I wasn’t totally listening when you last explained all this to me on the phone. You start with a list of places. Aukland, New Zealand; Kokamo, Indiana; Toas, New Mexico and here... Bristol.
You tell me how you can hear The Hum, how some days it’s louder than others. You tell me that the night before the Boxing Day Tsunami it was so loud that you couldn’t sleep, That you heard it before Haiti, before Chile, before that Volcano took down every plane in Europe.
I’ve read all this online. You’re talking about Seismic Warfare: The manipulation of tectonic plates for military effect.
You can see the look on my face.
You take me to a room full of readouts from your own, home made seismographs, you have written dates and times on them in ballpoint pen. You point to patterns that you say link up with natural disasters. I cannot read the printouts well enough to know if you are telling the truth or not. I am not sure that you can either.
I look around the room, bit’s of blue graph paper are pinned to every wall, with the blood red ink of the needle, meandering across them like a river.
We are quiet for a moment. You imagine that I am taking in the irrefutable evidence of the seismographs. Then the needles start to move as your upstairs neighbour’s pornography gets loud enough for both of us to clearly hear what a young woman is asking a man or perhaps several men to do her.
‘That little shit!’
Leaving me alone in the graph room you storm out of your flat to confront him. I see your footfall outlined in red ink. every time your hammer like fist bangs on his door I see it immortalised in by the sylus arm. The pattern is unmistakably similar to the one I am holding in my hand. The one with ‘Christmas Day 2008 11pm!!!’ written with three exclamations.
He call’s you a freak. He say’s it’s a free country; that a man can do what he likes within the confines of his own home; that if you don’t like it you should buy some earplugs.
By the time you come downstairs, I’ve already left.
It doesn’t quite go down like that; during some dreamlike reflection on the scrolling greenbelt between Bath and Bristol I forget the password. Luckily I still remember the meeting place.
Temple Meads Station is Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s gateway to the West Country. There are posters on the walls that carry his name. Apparently he built it in a complex expanding curve, I am told that no two girders in the lofted Iron ceiling are exactly the same size. Looking up I don’t quite believe it, but I am impressed.
This building is a Cathedral to the steam engine. A statement of futuristic intent from a founding father of the industrial revolution; a dignified grandfather to Modernity; a distant ape-like ancestor of our complex and imploding world.
Finding you in the magazine stand I put my hand on your shoulder and you jump. I say, ‘Hi, you must be the hum guy’ and you look at me suspiciously and herd me out of the newsagent into the ticket hall. With your hand on the small of my back we move swiftly out the automatic doors and into the nearest taxi. You’re about sixty-five years old and look pretty much as I pictured you from your voice on the phone. A gruff, rough skinned Bristolian Silverback. Although you are the older one, you are clearly nervous. I am having a hard time not being amused by this. I know that I am not from the CIA, I know, well at least I am pretty sure, that no one from the CIA is in the least bit interested in what you have to show me.
‘So,’ I say ‘Do you want to explain what we’re going to see or what?’
‘Not here’ you say and flash you’re eyes towards the driver. I catch his eye in the rear-view mirror and give him a wink for good measure. You don’t like this. First I screw up the password and now I’m signalling to the driver, this whole thing was a bad idea. It was a risk… but for a bona fide journalist, even a small time hack like myself, to be the least bit interested in your work… It’s worth it.
You believe you are showing me something important, perhaps it’s the most important thing in the world, This is Watergate territory… you believe that I might be the spark that starts the fire that sets the whole world burning. You believe, you hope.
I sit opposite you in the taxi looking at your face, trying to figure you out. Perhaps you drank too much and it went to your head, perhaps you are just looking for meaning. Condescending snob that I am, I paint a picture of your life. I see you lifting and carying, banging in rivets, pressing buttons that cause large pieces of machinery to press down onto hot steel. Later I see you walking between jets of steam on the factory floor. You have risen through the ranks and are overseeing a shrinking human workforce and a growing army of droids. I see you sitting at home, whiskey in hand; At first you are comforted by the fact that you are needed, that you are an important cog in beautiful machine, and then slowly as the years pass, you start to question exactly what it is this machine is doing. The inhuman pulse of metal and heat that has chewed up your friends, your family, you.
In between decades of soap opera and cigarettes, you watch a number of nature documentaries about lonely animals in shrinking forests and you identify with them. Every year you make more and more cars and you see charts and graffs that rise like skyscrapers from a virgin tropical coastline. And then when you least expect it to, the graff drops and the whole thing, in all it’s immovable metallic glory, fucks off to china and leaves you standing by the roadside wondering what the hell just happened.
I am silently singing an unwritten Bruce Springsteen classic. My version of your life.
You look at me and you see it all, a college-prick with a notepad, some well worn clichés and an over-active imagination, no experience in the real world.
You tell the cabbie to stop, give him a Tenner and then encourage me to walk with you. We are near the Broadwalk Shopping Centre. We take a right off The Wells Road and head into a no-frills council estate. Some of the houses are boarded up, some are pebble dashed or comprised of raw breezeblocks. There is a pub flying England flags. even in a world cup year, I read unwritten words in the red and white ‘violent patriotism... Us and Them’. Even as a white male, English as far back as I can count, they make me uncomfortable. I get the unnerving feeling that pink skinned liberals like myself are just as foreign as anyone else. My swagger is all gone.
I had thought that it would be fun to humour you, that there would be some hilarious material to be had for my blog.
What was it you told me on the phone?
Something about a noise you could hear in your head, something about the government. The Bristol Hum: You said you knew what it was and you could prove it. You told me to Google it and I did.
I learned all about it, and I laughed while did. I mentioned you to my wife as ‘the craziest caller I’d had that day’. I felt guilty even as I did it. I felt like I was betraying you. Betraying your naive trust.
You get a key out of your pocket and open the front door to your flat. You live on the ground floor of a council house. The front door just gets us into the stair well. There is a rusty bike with no wheels. I watch you search around for seccond key. While you’re searching you drop your informant persona, candidly you tell me about your upstairs neighbour. He is a tosser, He is always playing his music and stomping around like an elephant. You say that when it’s not music it’s porn, at full volume in the middle of the day. You tell me that if you can catch him you’ll ring his scrawny neck. We step inside.
The room is dark and brown, an old two-man sofa with wooden arms sits against one wall and a TV close to the other. There is one of those gas fires with a grid of ceramic bobbles. The kind they always replace on 60 minute makeover. Where the coffee table would normally be is a machine that appears to be feeding a roll of paper from one box to another while a needle skips up and down across it. ‘Got one in every room.’ You tell me. ‘It measures, tremors and that.’
I am blanc.
You look at me like I’m stupid. Like maybe I wasn’t totally listening when you last explained all this to me on the phone. You start with a list of places. Aukland, New Zealand; Kokamo, Indiana; Toas, New Mexico and here... Bristol.
You tell me how you can hear The Hum, how some days it’s louder than others. You tell me that the night before the Boxing Day Tsunami it was so loud that you couldn’t sleep, That you heard it before Haiti, before Chile, before that Volcano took down every plane in Europe.
I’ve read all this online. You’re talking about Seismic Warfare: The manipulation of tectonic plates for military effect.
You can see the look on my face.
You take me to a room full of readouts from your own, home made seismographs, you have written dates and times on them in ballpoint pen. You point to patterns that you say link up with natural disasters. I cannot read the printouts well enough to know if you are telling the truth or not. I am not sure that you can either.
I look around the room, bit’s of blue graph paper are pinned to every wall, with the blood red ink of the needle, meandering across them like a river.
We are quiet for a moment. You imagine that I am taking in the irrefutable evidence of the seismographs. Then the needles start to move as your upstairs neighbour’s pornography gets loud enough for both of us to clearly hear what a young woman is asking a man or perhaps several men to do her.
‘That little shit!’
Leaving me alone in the graph room you storm out of your flat to confront him. I see your footfall outlined in red ink. every time your hammer like fist bangs on his door I see it immortalised in by the sylus arm. The pattern is unmistakably similar to the one I am holding in my hand. The one with ‘Christmas Day 2008 11pm!!!’ written with three exclamations.
He call’s you a freak. He say’s it’s a free country; that a man can do what he likes within the confines of his own home; that if you don’t like it you should buy some earplugs.
By the time you come downstairs, I’ve already left.
Tuesday 2 February 2010
Mystery of the Snow Sharks
It’s four in the morning and I can’t sleep. I’ve been working a lot of morning shifts, which you would think would see me getting up and going to bed early but in reality what happens is I just tire myself out and then spend a whole day asleep. Then I’m left stuck, waking up at 6pm and not feeling at all tired until at least four. The world is a strange place late at night. Up until about three it gets increasingly louder and rowdier, then everyone goes home to bed. By four the streets are silent. At five it is likely that the odd taxicab or cop-car will come by, dustmen, postmen and milkmen.
I lie in my bed and calmly contemplate the ceiling. It’s cold outside of bed. I have felt the temperature steadily fall ever since it got dark. Eventually I decide to give up. I decide that it might be a good idea to brave the cold and stop pretending I am going to sleep. I roll my feet out of bed. Drain the water on my bedside table.
I decide that it will be a great idea to put some proper clothes on, leave the house and head into the centre of town, in the middle of Bath there is this amazing all-night pastry place, ever since it opened it’s been a constant temptation. During my insomnia the idea of a Apple Danish, has been recurring in my mind like a pop song. I picture myself biting down on it, it crumbling on my teeth and lips. In my mind it is drizzled with that thin white icing, it is perfect.
My keys are on the coffee table, I scoop them up along with my wallet, push them into the pocket of my jacket and leave the flat.
The whole road is covered in snow. It’s still falling, thick flakes tumbling down that for some reason remind me of eyelashes. Thick and beautiful. The last time I saw snow I was up a mountain. It is strange and magical to have it come and visit me here, in my home town.
It’s rare to be alone in the city. Rare to be the first person to walk on snow in what will be a very busy street. It Squeeks and crumps beneath my feet. The unmistakable sound of snow, each footfall sounds like a muted avalanche.
I live where George Street meets the Paragon, after walking fifty feet or so, I can see all the way up Landsdown Hill. It looks like a ski-slope, the orange of the streetlights reflecting back up in circles, silhouetting the lights themselves against the snow.
I press on.
Snow reveals the secret life of the city, I see the tracks of birds, I see the padded footsteps of a fox where it has trotted between the cars. At the end of a line of tracks I see a tiny black cat sheltering beneath a car, it’s big eyes trying to suss me out and I bend down to get a better look at it.
Parked cars line my route, each with it’s own thick white blanket. Officially they will have to be moved in the morning, but honestly I don’t see how this is going to be possible.
I see a pair of cars, almost identical, facing each other. I smile as I draw a heart shape on each of their windshields. Now these cars are in love. As I walk on I start to imagine their owners, a man and a woman, both attractive, both lonely, both coming out to find my little piece of art. I wonder if this is how magic happens, this little whim of mine, I paint a picture of myself as an unwitting instrument of magic.
The Pastry shop is the only one that is open. The light from It’s big red sign floods the street. There are more tracks here, human tracks heading towards the doorway.
Inside I find a small group of stoner kids. Unsurprisingly they love this place, they are gathered around a red and white ‘family bag’ dolling out Almond Twists and a couple of those Pecan and Maple Latices. They are eating take out, but staying in the building to do it. This is probably because take out food is slightly cheaper. Restaurant food counts as a luxury and thus attracts VAT (sales tax) where as take out is a necessity and doesn’t. They look at me, wondering what to make of this new presence in their immediate vicinity. I take off my hat and head to the counter.
Tonight Moio’s Italian Pastry shop is staffed by a Polish guy whose name I don’t know, he has to wear a paper hat, red and white like everything else. I look at the Pastries behind the sneeze guard. Through glass they look even nicer, like paintings in a frame.
I pick out an Apple Danish and one of those square ones with half a canned peach in the middle. ‘To go, thanks’ I hand over my money and take a seat. He doesn’t seem to mind that everyone lies about eating in. I guess he is the guy that would have to do the washing up. This way he just has to empty the bins.
The group of students have almost finished their food. They loundly talk about how good their it tasted, they have their own language, I feel like I am in a foreign country, but one that I used to live in. I can understand most of what they say, but the occasional phrase is new.
“He can’t slix him up like that an spex him to just glide on it like it didn’t do… Cuz it did, man, it totally did.”
I smile to myself, look at the group. This time of night doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to them, my kind should be at home in bed. They pick up their mess and drop it into one of the bins on the way out, leaving me thoughtfully chewing over my Danish.
On my way home I draw in the snow on several more cars, I get creative, start doing things that I don’t think other people would think of doing, sharks, a duck a cartoon bunny rabbit with big googly eyes. I fantasise about doing every car in Bath, about the whole town waking up to find a picture on their windscreen but in the end I don’t even do all the cars on my way home.
I lie in my bed and calmly contemplate the ceiling. It’s cold outside of bed. I have felt the temperature steadily fall ever since it got dark. Eventually I decide to give up. I decide that it might be a good idea to brave the cold and stop pretending I am going to sleep. I roll my feet out of bed. Drain the water on my bedside table.
I decide that it will be a great idea to put some proper clothes on, leave the house and head into the centre of town, in the middle of Bath there is this amazing all-night pastry place, ever since it opened it’s been a constant temptation. During my insomnia the idea of a Apple Danish, has been recurring in my mind like a pop song. I picture myself biting down on it, it crumbling on my teeth and lips. In my mind it is drizzled with that thin white icing, it is perfect.
My keys are on the coffee table, I scoop them up along with my wallet, push them into the pocket of my jacket and leave the flat.
The whole road is covered in snow. It’s still falling, thick flakes tumbling down that for some reason remind me of eyelashes. Thick and beautiful. The last time I saw snow I was up a mountain. It is strange and magical to have it come and visit me here, in my home town.
It’s rare to be alone in the city. Rare to be the first person to walk on snow in what will be a very busy street. It Squeeks and crumps beneath my feet. The unmistakable sound of snow, each footfall sounds like a muted avalanche.
I live where George Street meets the Paragon, after walking fifty feet or so, I can see all the way up Landsdown Hill. It looks like a ski-slope, the orange of the streetlights reflecting back up in circles, silhouetting the lights themselves against the snow.
I press on.
Snow reveals the secret life of the city, I see the tracks of birds, I see the padded footsteps of a fox where it has trotted between the cars. At the end of a line of tracks I see a tiny black cat sheltering beneath a car, it’s big eyes trying to suss me out and I bend down to get a better look at it.
Parked cars line my route, each with it’s own thick white blanket. Officially they will have to be moved in the morning, but honestly I don’t see how this is going to be possible.
I see a pair of cars, almost identical, facing each other. I smile as I draw a heart shape on each of their windshields. Now these cars are in love. As I walk on I start to imagine their owners, a man and a woman, both attractive, both lonely, both coming out to find my little piece of art. I wonder if this is how magic happens, this little whim of mine, I paint a picture of myself as an unwitting instrument of magic.
The Pastry shop is the only one that is open. The light from It’s big red sign floods the street. There are more tracks here, human tracks heading towards the doorway.
Inside I find a small group of stoner kids. Unsurprisingly they love this place, they are gathered around a red and white ‘family bag’ dolling out Almond Twists and a couple of those Pecan and Maple Latices. They are eating take out, but staying in the building to do it. This is probably because take out food is slightly cheaper. Restaurant food counts as a luxury and thus attracts VAT (sales tax) where as take out is a necessity and doesn’t. They look at me, wondering what to make of this new presence in their immediate vicinity. I take off my hat and head to the counter.
Tonight Moio’s Italian Pastry shop is staffed by a Polish guy whose name I don’t know, he has to wear a paper hat, red and white like everything else. I look at the Pastries behind the sneeze guard. Through glass they look even nicer, like paintings in a frame.
I pick out an Apple Danish and one of those square ones with half a canned peach in the middle. ‘To go, thanks’ I hand over my money and take a seat. He doesn’t seem to mind that everyone lies about eating in. I guess he is the guy that would have to do the washing up. This way he just has to empty the bins.
The group of students have almost finished their food. They loundly talk about how good their it tasted, they have their own language, I feel like I am in a foreign country, but one that I used to live in. I can understand most of what they say, but the occasional phrase is new.
“He can’t slix him up like that an spex him to just glide on it like it didn’t do… Cuz it did, man, it totally did.”
I smile to myself, look at the group. This time of night doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to them, my kind should be at home in bed. They pick up their mess and drop it into one of the bins on the way out, leaving me thoughtfully chewing over my Danish.
On my way home I draw in the snow on several more cars, I get creative, start doing things that I don’t think other people would think of doing, sharks, a duck a cartoon bunny rabbit with big googly eyes. I fantasise about doing every car in Bath, about the whole town waking up to find a picture on their windscreen but in the end I don’t even do all the cars on my way home.
Sunday 24 January 2010
More Items Hidden in the Database...
Where I work we have a database that includes descriptions of the staff along side their telephone number and contact details. Since this can be edited by anyone I have taken the trouble to add to their descriptions. So far no one has noticed... here are some of them.
1.
[Name Deleted] likes to tape office stationary to his body. Once properly attached he covers it up with clothing and then walks around the news room doing thrusts. If you ask him about this he will lie and tell you that it never happens, but the truth is I have video evidence.
2.
[Name Deleted] Holds the world record for unassisted human flight, having once flown from Dover to Paris without the use of camera trickery or an airplane, he just flaps his arms really really fast. If you ask him to show you, he will.
3.
[Name Deleted] has a draw full of those little polystyrene balls that you get in bean bags. When no one is looking she likes to plunge her hand into it and just swirl them around and around.
You can tell when she's doing it because she gets this far-away look in her eye, like she's remembering the last time she was truly happy.
4.
[Name Deleted] invented the water cooler as a way to keep Arctic fish alive in an office environment. Sadly the technology was stolen by corporate interests, in their 'thirst' for money and power the fish were left behind. As a result the life expectancy of an Arctic Grayling in the average office is under seven minutes. Talk about a glass ceiling!
There are more out there but that's enough for now I think.
1.
[Name Deleted] likes to tape office stationary to his body. Once properly attached he covers it up with clothing and then walks around the news room doing thrusts. If you ask him about this he will lie and tell you that it never happens, but the truth is I have video evidence.
2.
[Name Deleted] Holds the world record for unassisted human flight, having once flown from Dover to Paris without the use of camera trickery or an airplane, he just flaps his arms really really fast. If you ask him to show you, he will.
3.
[Name Deleted] has a draw full of those little polystyrene balls that you get in bean bags. When no one is looking she likes to plunge her hand into it and just swirl them around and around.
You can tell when she's doing it because she gets this far-away look in her eye, like she's remembering the last time she was truly happy.
4.
[Name Deleted] invented the water cooler as a way to keep Arctic fish alive in an office environment. Sadly the technology was stolen by corporate interests, in their 'thirst' for money and power the fish were left behind. As a result the life expectancy of an Arctic Grayling in the average office is under seven minutes. Talk about a glass ceiling!
There are more out there but that's enough for now I think.
Wednesday 13 January 2010
Tea with The Trogs
Tim is a radio Journalist friend of mine that’s just bought a car and is in that phase where he just wants to go and drive places for the hell of it. The period in time before the car becomes an expensive necessity and is still an amazing luxury. He’s a keen reader of the blog and thus knows that, when I’m not ruling Keynsham like a despotic lord, I am always up for going off and doing weird and wonderful things. Tim calls me from work, he’s heard about some people claiming to be indigenous Britons. He wants to do a piece on them, but is worried that they will turn all BNP on him and start trying to use the radio station as a platform for race hatred and xenophobic bigotry. At the same time though he is interested… These people claim to have never heard of Nick Griffin. They claim to have no interest in petty politics; they claim in fact that their family hasn’t changed its way of life for over 1000 years.
I don’t really believe him, it seems impossible for these people to have slipped through the net for so long. Tim doesn’t believe them either, but he wants to go and take a look all the same.
We organise to meet up on Sunday, My car is getting it’s yearly £600 MOT and won’t be fixed until hell sufferers a second ice age but for the reasons stated above Tim is more than happy to pick me up in his Rover.
I can see why old people like rovers, the suspension is soft and soothing, its like driving on a mattress. Tim’s is particularly comforting because like his house, it smells of toast. For some reason he has this affect on everything that he owns.
Tim’s puts on a tape of his band, Panic Number. I nod a smile and tell him that I think it’s great and that I particularly like what he’s done with the sequencing and synth effects. One of the other members of the band works at the station and he and Tim are quite close and while I get on well with both of them I’ve never felt like I totally fit in. Groups of close friends can be hard to get to know. They have a few private jokes and memes. They say, ‘that’s a massive shout’ instead of ‘that’s a good idea’ they make the same odd noise from time to time. Kind of a cross between Dot Cotton finding a pound and the Skecksi’s from the Dark Cristal. They both have an irrational love of Oasis ten years after the fact, this is evident in their music.
Occasionally I find myself using one of their catchphrases and it always feels just slightly awkward, like I’m not sure if I’m allowed to. Sadly modes of speech are contagious and the other day I caught my wife saying that it might be a “good shout “ to pop by Waitrose on the way home and get some broccoli. She’s never even met them.
As Panic Number gets to the end of another track called ‘Stay’ and the lyrics that I hear as being, “there’s nothing wrong with being happy, these false dreams will tear you away” start getting repeated over and over, I start to reflect on fitting in. We are about to visit the ultimate misfits and I am thinking about how I don’t really drink, how the sports I love are solo sports, and that I’ve never been in a band, I start to frame a history of my life with me always on the outside looking in. Not hated, not even disliked most of the time but a tolerated presence at best.
We have been quiet in the car for a while and I guess I’m getting slightly pensive and melancholy, I could use a cup of coffee, especially if we’re going to talk to new people.
“What are we actually looking for?”
“Well a hut , or a TeePee or something?”
“Do they know we’re coming?”
The house doesn’t have an address, so we had to type a grid reference into the Sat Nav in order to get there. There also isn’t a road so after circling some woods for about half an hour we realise that this is as close as it’s going to get and decide to proceed into them on foot.
We come to the conclusion between the two of us that people turning up unannounced is probably the norm with these people. But then according to what Tim has told me about them the norm seems like a bit of an odd term.
‘No mobile phones?’
‘No’
‘No electricity?’
‘No’
‘Why aren’t their hundreds of them, like a whole tribe?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Tell me where you found out about these people again?’
Someone coughing behind our backs interrupts us. Like goons in a cartoon we turn around simultaneously and find ourselves face to face with what looks like a professor of theology crossed with a Womble. He has an impressively long beard, I’d half expected him to be draped in animal skins and holding some sort of stone spear but instead he has a home made blue shirt on and some black canvas trousers. The only thing really odd about the way he is dressed are his shoes. They are made of a material the same colour as the shirt and are kind of lashed around his feet with blue twine.
‘Hello’ he says, there is something strange about his accent. It’s west-country no doubt about that, but there is something else there as well, a little bit welsh perhaps, a little bit Irish.
‘Well, are you going to explain why you’re here ?'
This is where Tim comes into his own. He’s a proper journalist and thus is used to explaining why he’s poking in other peoples business.
'I’m from local radio, I’m a reporter, if it’s alright I’d like to find out a bit more about you so that we can do something about your situation with the council.'
'Fair enough, let me take you to the house, show you want they want to break down'
He doesn’t even ask about me.
The strange man takes us to what looks like an octagonal log cabin that backs onto a hill side, He offers us a cup of tea. I am thinking ‘they wouldn’t have had tea 1000 years ago!’ but I am too polite to say this out loud and too grateful to be somewhere warm after the cold of the woods.
‘This is the bit they originally wanted us to take down’ he says. Apparently they built this particular version of the building in 1987 when a large number of trees came down and they found themselves with a job lot of free timbre. Above the door way is a single word in a language that I don’t understand ‘Kálvalíd’ he tells us that it’s simply the name of the house.
When I ask him what his name is he say’s Cenweard. At first I think it’s two names, like his name is Ken Weird, I make him spell it out for me. It’s a soft C, he says we can call him Cen.
The hut is held up by a circle of wooden pillars around the outside. The roof itself is a spiral of unfinished logs coming out from a large glass covered hole in the centre. It looks like a giant wooden aperture of a camera, In the far wall, facing the hillside is an ominous door covered only with a curtain. Most of the furniture is low level and clearly home made.
I am strangely reassured to see that our tea is to be made with water from a large bottle poured into an old tin kettle and boiled on a small wood burning stove. It seems authentic, the real deal. Then my brain kicks in. The water bottle is plastic and kettle clearly industrially produced. I notice a naked electric light-bulb hanging from a wire.
Cen places a tray, and three three mugs of tea onto a coffee table made from a cross section of a log. One has ‘Worlds Greatest Dad’ written on it, another a picture of a duck. They clearly didn’t make these mugs themselves.
Tim seems to also take in this incongruous information.
‘How do you live… day to day?’ asks Tim.
In a practiced sounding speech, Cen describes to us a cross between hunter-gathering and farming, or rather it’s farming but to look at it from the outside you would have no idea that you were on a farm. In their wood, which they’ve apparently owned since before anyone can remember, they cultivate wild varieties of fruit and vegetables, in particular the root vegetables that make up the bulk of their diet, to supplement this they encourage the growth of certain types of berries as well as wild chestnuts and other goodies. There is apparently a herd of venison in the wood. Cen and his family move them around the forest and keep the stock healthy by controlling the breeding, when the time comes they hunt them with bows. There is a warren on their land and so they eat rabbits but they also make keep the bunnies well fed in the winter by leaving out forage when it is thin on the ground. Cen does his best to make it clear that it is a partnership, that “for the wild to look after you, you have to look after the wild.” It all sounds like quite a lot of work.
‘How do you hunt the Rabbits?’ I say having some notion that to do so with snares would be illegal.
‘With hawks.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes’ he says ‘and sometimes snares’
I ask if I can see the hawks, and he tells me that they are not kept in the house but in a special roost, ‘perhaps, he says, when we’ve finished our tea he will take us up there.
Cen catches me looking disapprovingly at his light bulb.
‘We are not a historical re-enactment society’ he says. ‘We actually live here,’
‘but you told the council that…’
‘I said, “way of life”, that’s not about light bulbs, it’s about how and why you live.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be…’
‘Apology excepted’
I thank him again for the tea. Slightly embarrassed.
It turns out that the light bulb is somewhat of a sore spot. It is connected to a solar panel on the roof, which he received in barter from a local butcher. According to the Council, the solar panel reflected the sun and caught the attention of a light aircraft. The pilot was taking aerial photographs of peoples homes with a view to selling them to the owners, upon getting home he got curious to the fact that there were no houses listed in the wood and he could not match up his shot to a postcode, he contacted the Council, they decided that if there was an unlisted property then it didn’t have planning permission and they would have to tear it down. When Cen told them his family had been there for 1000 years and not to be ridiculous, they decided that he and his family either owed them a lot of money in back taxes, or were lying and would have to vacate the premises immediately. They have since received several aggressive letters, many stating that ‘in order to preserve wildlife’ the council cannot allow people to build houses just anywhere they like. One saying that they owe the Council for 58 years of council tax, and could be facing a severe term of imprisonment.
He wants to paint a picture for us of a council that is incompetent and needlessly aggressive. He feels victimised, he feels as if the needs and wants of some hypothetical bats and badgers are being placed far above his own. Cen has a petition that he wants’ people to sign, he has even talked about taking the council to court for harassment. He claims to already have the support of the local villages, but he is unsure if this is going to be enough and is hoping that we can help get his plight to a larger audience. It is easy however to see the councils side on this as well, until last year they had no idea he existed, for all they know he could be the leader of a group of homeless people who have come to the woods for the summer and are out to use it for free parties.
Cen says that it’s ridiculous for them to claim they had no idea he was here. His house is mentioned in the doomsday book and what’s more his children attend the same local school that his father did. His wife even receives child support by post and has done for years. To suggest they had no idea he was here until he was spotted by a spy plane seems ridiculous.
I look around at the house, Didn’t he already tell us he built it in 1987? That’s a good 900 years after the doomsday.
Leaning forward and taking a conspiratorial tone he tells us that he thinks that there is another reason why all this is happening. He thinks it’s because the forest is part of a section of land earmarked for development. ‘They want me out the way’ he says ‘ so they can build a bunch of bloody houses.’ He says that they are ‘only claiming he is damaging the environment living here, so they can go ahead and totally destroy it.’ After that he sits back again and watches for our reaction.
There are places in the world that I love, places that the very thought of their being under threat brings a tear to my eye. There is a magical rolling meadow in Colorado, A steeply wooded valley near an old stone bridge in West Wales, not to mention the secluded, dear spotted trails around the skyline of Bath. These are the parts of the world that I think of when I hear the word countryside and I know that I would feel their loss as hard as the death of a friend. If Cen’s story is true then I cannot imagine what it must be like to be as connected to a piece of land as he is with this one. That piece of woodland, that stretch of moor has never kept me fed and watered and as far as I know I am the first person in my family to feel the way I do about them. Cen is made completely of this land, his mind and body, generations of his DNA have tended it, fed on it and in the end been buried in its rich black soil. Sunshine breaks through the canopy. Rainwater drips from leafless winter branches. This is his flesh and blood. I get the feeling that if they really do want to build here they will have to do so over his bruised and battered corpse.
We finish our tea. Tim thinks that he has enough material for his feature but figures that he can’t really use it unless he gets something from the council or he will be accused of bias. We are about to get up and leave when Cen asks us if we would like to see the rest of the house.
‘The rest of the house?’
‘You didn’t think this was it, did you?’ he says with a rye smile.
He leads us through the curtained door at the back of the room and into a passage way of rock, leading back into the hillside for about fifteen or twenty feet and then invites us to climb down a ladder perhaps another 15 feet down into what Cen calls ‘The master bedroom’
The room is surprisingly well lit, a series of small shafts penetrate the dusty air through coin sized holes drilled up through the rock. Twenty or so, tiny spot-lights that give the impression of standing beneath a static disco ball. Cen says he can tell the time by looking at the lights, though not at night or course... I see now that they are arranged in a circle around the bed in the centre of the chamber. The floor beneath our feet has been levelled and then tiled with adobe slabs and is covered with more woven cloths and dear skins. On the bed is a quilt made of squares of rabbit pelt and mounted on the far wall I see a very business-like medieval sword. Off to one side is a barrell full of bows, some made of wood others fibreglass constructions decorated in garish 80’s style colours. The room feels like a tepee with all the storage arranged around the sloping sides. He points nonchalantly towards another hole in the wall ‘that’s the kids bedroom in there, and then up this ladder is the kitchen and bathroom.; we climb up to see the kitchen, as if being shown around a giant rabbit warrant by a vary hairy estate agent,
‘How many of you live here?’
‘Right now there are six of us, me and my wife, two kids, although they’re getting to be a bit more than kids now, teens I guess… and my brother and his girlfriend, he came back to help out when my father passed away.’
‘So he left for a while
‘Only the oldest son can stay,’ Says Cen as if this was the most obvious fact in the world, otherwise we’d starve; our patch of forest can comfortably support maybe ten humans in any given year, but even that’s would be pushing it a bit.’
We reach the top of the ladder, and find ourselves on in the kitchen/bathroom at the top where the ladder comes out are pots and pans, illuminated by more drilled holes up to the surface, this time about the size of dinner plates and pointing directly down on to the cooking serface of an Aga. I cannot begin to imagine the difficulty with which it was installed. The Aga is connected to a chimney that disappears up into the roof. The Kitchen/Bathroom is long and narrow and slopes down towards a pool of clear blue water perhaps 10 meters down from the ladder.
‘It’s a flowing section of the river’ he says, ‘This is the only room in the house with running water… It’s cold and it’s deep but it’s good for washing’ he says ‘we have to boil it if we want to drink it.’ I can see that steps have been carved along one side wall so that people can get down to the water without slipping on the bare rock. He premempts my question by telling me that they don’t use it as a toilet. I guess even when it’s a flowing river, you don’t poop in your own water supply. I think of that plastic bottle from the shed outside, the second stove outside room is the only place I have seen electric light. I’m betting that they cook out there more than they do in here.
‘Sometimes it floods, but I’ve never seen it come up as high as the Aga.’
There is one more room that he wants to show us, he calls it the dining room it is apparently the oldest room in the house. A curtain is pushed aside and we step into another passage that leads off from the kitchen. Down the centre of the room in a long rectangular table which dominates the room. The rough-hewn oak wood is black with age and set with three sets of tarnished silver candlesticks. Once again the floor has been levelled but this time with stone paving rather than the adobe from upstairs. There are no top lights so it take a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, when my eyes start to adjust I can see that the rock of the walls has been carved into false pillars, topped with dragons and gargoyles along the sides of the walls. Every few feet along the walls there are candlenooks blacked at the top with soot. As my eyes adjust I can see that there is some kind of painting on the ceiling but with just one lantern between the three of us I can’t really make it out.
‘What… what is this?’
‘It’s the dining room’ says Cen ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had cause to redecorate it’
I walk around carefully as if in a museum, afraid that if I touch anything then it will crumble into dust. Tim goes to inspect the ornate wooden chair that sits at the head of the table.
‘Do the council know about this?’ he says.
‘They will if they come down. But for the time being I don’t fancy playing host to a gang of historians’
In a strange dreamlike daze we make our way back through the cave. There are more doors and curtains that we are not shown behind; this appears to be a quite substantial system converted slowly and relentalasly into a family home.. Eventually we find ourselves climbing the last ladder and returning to comfortable familiarity of the octagonal room.
Our tea cups still sitting on the coffee table, my coat still draped over the back of my chair. They anchor us in reality.
‘It’s an amazing life you’ve got down here Cen’
‘yeah, I’ll remind my self of that next time its raining and I run out of fire wood.’
Then he turns to Tim ‘Thank you for coming’ he says, ‘No one else did.’
We are halfway back to the car when Tim realises that he failed to record anything in the cave itself. He is kicking himself and considering going back,
I say that perhaps the inside of the cave was ‘off the record’ he waited until the Nagra Recorder was out of sight before he even mentioned it’s existence. Tim ponders this, remembers the historian comment and in the end he contents himself to edit down what he’s got and try to get some reaction quotes from the council. We get back to his toast smelling car, back to Panic Number and the mundane world of A roads and roundabouts.
“do you reckon you could do it?’ says Tim
“What, live in a cave? yeah mate. I do”
I don’t really believe him, it seems impossible for these people to have slipped through the net for so long. Tim doesn’t believe them either, but he wants to go and take a look all the same.
We organise to meet up on Sunday, My car is getting it’s yearly £600 MOT and won’t be fixed until hell sufferers a second ice age but for the reasons stated above Tim is more than happy to pick me up in his Rover.
I can see why old people like rovers, the suspension is soft and soothing, its like driving on a mattress. Tim’s is particularly comforting because like his house, it smells of toast. For some reason he has this affect on everything that he owns.
Tim’s puts on a tape of his band, Panic Number. I nod a smile and tell him that I think it’s great and that I particularly like what he’s done with the sequencing and synth effects. One of the other members of the band works at the station and he and Tim are quite close and while I get on well with both of them I’ve never felt like I totally fit in. Groups of close friends can be hard to get to know. They have a few private jokes and memes. They say, ‘that’s a massive shout’ instead of ‘that’s a good idea’ they make the same odd noise from time to time. Kind of a cross between Dot Cotton finding a pound and the Skecksi’s from the Dark Cristal. They both have an irrational love of Oasis ten years after the fact, this is evident in their music.
Occasionally I find myself using one of their catchphrases and it always feels just slightly awkward, like I’m not sure if I’m allowed to. Sadly modes of speech are contagious and the other day I caught my wife saying that it might be a “good shout “ to pop by Waitrose on the way home and get some broccoli. She’s never even met them.
As Panic Number gets to the end of another track called ‘Stay’ and the lyrics that I hear as being, “there’s nothing wrong with being happy, these false dreams will tear you away” start getting repeated over and over, I start to reflect on fitting in. We are about to visit the ultimate misfits and I am thinking about how I don’t really drink, how the sports I love are solo sports, and that I’ve never been in a band, I start to frame a history of my life with me always on the outside looking in. Not hated, not even disliked most of the time but a tolerated presence at best.
We have been quiet in the car for a while and I guess I’m getting slightly pensive and melancholy, I could use a cup of coffee, especially if we’re going to talk to new people.
“What are we actually looking for?”
“Well a hut , or a TeePee or something?”
“Do they know we’re coming?”
The house doesn’t have an address, so we had to type a grid reference into the Sat Nav in order to get there. There also isn’t a road so after circling some woods for about half an hour we realise that this is as close as it’s going to get and decide to proceed into them on foot.
We come to the conclusion between the two of us that people turning up unannounced is probably the norm with these people. But then according to what Tim has told me about them the norm seems like a bit of an odd term.
‘No mobile phones?’
‘No’
‘No electricity?’
‘No’
‘Why aren’t their hundreds of them, like a whole tribe?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Tell me where you found out about these people again?’
Someone coughing behind our backs interrupts us. Like goons in a cartoon we turn around simultaneously and find ourselves face to face with what looks like a professor of theology crossed with a Womble. He has an impressively long beard, I’d half expected him to be draped in animal skins and holding some sort of stone spear but instead he has a home made blue shirt on and some black canvas trousers. The only thing really odd about the way he is dressed are his shoes. They are made of a material the same colour as the shirt and are kind of lashed around his feet with blue twine.
‘Hello’ he says, there is something strange about his accent. It’s west-country no doubt about that, but there is something else there as well, a little bit welsh perhaps, a little bit Irish.
‘Well, are you going to explain why you’re here ?'
This is where Tim comes into his own. He’s a proper journalist and thus is used to explaining why he’s poking in other peoples business.
'I’m from local radio, I’m a reporter, if it’s alright I’d like to find out a bit more about you so that we can do something about your situation with the council.'
'Fair enough, let me take you to the house, show you want they want to break down'
He doesn’t even ask about me.
The strange man takes us to what looks like an octagonal log cabin that backs onto a hill side, He offers us a cup of tea. I am thinking ‘they wouldn’t have had tea 1000 years ago!’ but I am too polite to say this out loud and too grateful to be somewhere warm after the cold of the woods.
‘This is the bit they originally wanted us to take down’ he says. Apparently they built this particular version of the building in 1987 when a large number of trees came down and they found themselves with a job lot of free timbre. Above the door way is a single word in a language that I don’t understand ‘Kálvalíd’ he tells us that it’s simply the name of the house.
When I ask him what his name is he say’s Cenweard. At first I think it’s two names, like his name is Ken Weird, I make him spell it out for me. It’s a soft C, he says we can call him Cen.
The hut is held up by a circle of wooden pillars around the outside. The roof itself is a spiral of unfinished logs coming out from a large glass covered hole in the centre. It looks like a giant wooden aperture of a camera, In the far wall, facing the hillside is an ominous door covered only with a curtain. Most of the furniture is low level and clearly home made.
I am strangely reassured to see that our tea is to be made with water from a large bottle poured into an old tin kettle and boiled on a small wood burning stove. It seems authentic, the real deal. Then my brain kicks in. The water bottle is plastic and kettle clearly industrially produced. I notice a naked electric light-bulb hanging from a wire.
Cen places a tray, and three three mugs of tea onto a coffee table made from a cross section of a log. One has ‘Worlds Greatest Dad’ written on it, another a picture of a duck. They clearly didn’t make these mugs themselves.
Tim seems to also take in this incongruous information.
‘How do you live… day to day?’ asks Tim.
In a practiced sounding speech, Cen describes to us a cross between hunter-gathering and farming, or rather it’s farming but to look at it from the outside you would have no idea that you were on a farm. In their wood, which they’ve apparently owned since before anyone can remember, they cultivate wild varieties of fruit and vegetables, in particular the root vegetables that make up the bulk of their diet, to supplement this they encourage the growth of certain types of berries as well as wild chestnuts and other goodies. There is apparently a herd of venison in the wood. Cen and his family move them around the forest and keep the stock healthy by controlling the breeding, when the time comes they hunt them with bows. There is a warren on their land and so they eat rabbits but they also make keep the bunnies well fed in the winter by leaving out forage when it is thin on the ground. Cen does his best to make it clear that it is a partnership, that “for the wild to look after you, you have to look after the wild.” It all sounds like quite a lot of work.
‘How do you hunt the Rabbits?’ I say having some notion that to do so with snares would be illegal.
‘With hawks.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes’ he says ‘and sometimes snares’
I ask if I can see the hawks, and he tells me that they are not kept in the house but in a special roost, ‘perhaps, he says, when we’ve finished our tea he will take us up there.
Cen catches me looking disapprovingly at his light bulb.
‘We are not a historical re-enactment society’ he says. ‘We actually live here,’
‘but you told the council that…’
‘I said, “way of life”, that’s not about light bulbs, it’s about how and why you live.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be…’
‘Apology excepted’
I thank him again for the tea. Slightly embarrassed.
It turns out that the light bulb is somewhat of a sore spot. It is connected to a solar panel on the roof, which he received in barter from a local butcher. According to the Council, the solar panel reflected the sun and caught the attention of a light aircraft. The pilot was taking aerial photographs of peoples homes with a view to selling them to the owners, upon getting home he got curious to the fact that there were no houses listed in the wood and he could not match up his shot to a postcode, he contacted the Council, they decided that if there was an unlisted property then it didn’t have planning permission and they would have to tear it down. When Cen told them his family had been there for 1000 years and not to be ridiculous, they decided that he and his family either owed them a lot of money in back taxes, or were lying and would have to vacate the premises immediately. They have since received several aggressive letters, many stating that ‘in order to preserve wildlife’ the council cannot allow people to build houses just anywhere they like. One saying that they owe the Council for 58 years of council tax, and could be facing a severe term of imprisonment.
He wants to paint a picture for us of a council that is incompetent and needlessly aggressive. He feels victimised, he feels as if the needs and wants of some hypothetical bats and badgers are being placed far above his own. Cen has a petition that he wants’ people to sign, he has even talked about taking the council to court for harassment. He claims to already have the support of the local villages, but he is unsure if this is going to be enough and is hoping that we can help get his plight to a larger audience. It is easy however to see the councils side on this as well, until last year they had no idea he existed, for all they know he could be the leader of a group of homeless people who have come to the woods for the summer and are out to use it for free parties.
Cen says that it’s ridiculous for them to claim they had no idea he was here. His house is mentioned in the doomsday book and what’s more his children attend the same local school that his father did. His wife even receives child support by post and has done for years. To suggest they had no idea he was here until he was spotted by a spy plane seems ridiculous.
I look around at the house, Didn’t he already tell us he built it in 1987? That’s a good 900 years after the doomsday.
Leaning forward and taking a conspiratorial tone he tells us that he thinks that there is another reason why all this is happening. He thinks it’s because the forest is part of a section of land earmarked for development. ‘They want me out the way’ he says ‘ so they can build a bunch of bloody houses.’ He says that they are ‘only claiming he is damaging the environment living here, so they can go ahead and totally destroy it.’ After that he sits back again and watches for our reaction.
There are places in the world that I love, places that the very thought of their being under threat brings a tear to my eye. There is a magical rolling meadow in Colorado, A steeply wooded valley near an old stone bridge in West Wales, not to mention the secluded, dear spotted trails around the skyline of Bath. These are the parts of the world that I think of when I hear the word countryside and I know that I would feel their loss as hard as the death of a friend. If Cen’s story is true then I cannot imagine what it must be like to be as connected to a piece of land as he is with this one. That piece of woodland, that stretch of moor has never kept me fed and watered and as far as I know I am the first person in my family to feel the way I do about them. Cen is made completely of this land, his mind and body, generations of his DNA have tended it, fed on it and in the end been buried in its rich black soil. Sunshine breaks through the canopy. Rainwater drips from leafless winter branches. This is his flesh and blood. I get the feeling that if they really do want to build here they will have to do so over his bruised and battered corpse.
We finish our tea. Tim thinks that he has enough material for his feature but figures that he can’t really use it unless he gets something from the council or he will be accused of bias. We are about to get up and leave when Cen asks us if we would like to see the rest of the house.
‘The rest of the house?’
‘You didn’t think this was it, did you?’ he says with a rye smile.
He leads us through the curtained door at the back of the room and into a passage way of rock, leading back into the hillside for about fifteen or twenty feet and then invites us to climb down a ladder perhaps another 15 feet down into what Cen calls ‘The master bedroom’
The room is surprisingly well lit, a series of small shafts penetrate the dusty air through coin sized holes drilled up through the rock. Twenty or so, tiny spot-lights that give the impression of standing beneath a static disco ball. Cen says he can tell the time by looking at the lights, though not at night or course... I see now that they are arranged in a circle around the bed in the centre of the chamber. The floor beneath our feet has been levelled and then tiled with adobe slabs and is covered with more woven cloths and dear skins. On the bed is a quilt made of squares of rabbit pelt and mounted on the far wall I see a very business-like medieval sword. Off to one side is a barrell full of bows, some made of wood others fibreglass constructions decorated in garish 80’s style colours. The room feels like a tepee with all the storage arranged around the sloping sides. He points nonchalantly towards another hole in the wall ‘that’s the kids bedroom in there, and then up this ladder is the kitchen and bathroom.; we climb up to see the kitchen, as if being shown around a giant rabbit warrant by a vary hairy estate agent,
‘How many of you live here?’
‘Right now there are six of us, me and my wife, two kids, although they’re getting to be a bit more than kids now, teens I guess… and my brother and his girlfriend, he came back to help out when my father passed away.’
‘So he left for a while
‘Only the oldest son can stay,’ Says Cen as if this was the most obvious fact in the world, otherwise we’d starve; our patch of forest can comfortably support maybe ten humans in any given year, but even that’s would be pushing it a bit.’
We reach the top of the ladder, and find ourselves on in the kitchen/bathroom at the top where the ladder comes out are pots and pans, illuminated by more drilled holes up to the surface, this time about the size of dinner plates and pointing directly down on to the cooking serface of an Aga. I cannot begin to imagine the difficulty with which it was installed. The Aga is connected to a chimney that disappears up into the roof. The Kitchen/Bathroom is long and narrow and slopes down towards a pool of clear blue water perhaps 10 meters down from the ladder.
‘It’s a flowing section of the river’ he says, ‘This is the only room in the house with running water… It’s cold and it’s deep but it’s good for washing’ he says ‘we have to boil it if we want to drink it.’ I can see that steps have been carved along one side wall so that people can get down to the water without slipping on the bare rock. He premempts my question by telling me that they don’t use it as a toilet. I guess even when it’s a flowing river, you don’t poop in your own water supply. I think of that plastic bottle from the shed outside, the second stove outside room is the only place I have seen electric light. I’m betting that they cook out there more than they do in here.
‘Sometimes it floods, but I’ve never seen it come up as high as the Aga.’
There is one more room that he wants to show us, he calls it the dining room it is apparently the oldest room in the house. A curtain is pushed aside and we step into another passage that leads off from the kitchen. Down the centre of the room in a long rectangular table which dominates the room. The rough-hewn oak wood is black with age and set with three sets of tarnished silver candlesticks. Once again the floor has been levelled but this time with stone paving rather than the adobe from upstairs. There are no top lights so it take a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, when my eyes start to adjust I can see that the rock of the walls has been carved into false pillars, topped with dragons and gargoyles along the sides of the walls. Every few feet along the walls there are candlenooks blacked at the top with soot. As my eyes adjust I can see that there is some kind of painting on the ceiling but with just one lantern between the three of us I can’t really make it out.
‘What… what is this?’
‘It’s the dining room’ says Cen ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had cause to redecorate it’
I walk around carefully as if in a museum, afraid that if I touch anything then it will crumble into dust. Tim goes to inspect the ornate wooden chair that sits at the head of the table.
‘Do the council know about this?’ he says.
‘They will if they come down. But for the time being I don’t fancy playing host to a gang of historians’
In a strange dreamlike daze we make our way back through the cave. There are more doors and curtains that we are not shown behind; this appears to be a quite substantial system converted slowly and relentalasly into a family home.. Eventually we find ourselves climbing the last ladder and returning to comfortable familiarity of the octagonal room.
Our tea cups still sitting on the coffee table, my coat still draped over the back of my chair. They anchor us in reality.
‘It’s an amazing life you’ve got down here Cen’
‘yeah, I’ll remind my self of that next time its raining and I run out of fire wood.’
Then he turns to Tim ‘Thank you for coming’ he says, ‘No one else did.’
We are halfway back to the car when Tim realises that he failed to record anything in the cave itself. He is kicking himself and considering going back,
I say that perhaps the inside of the cave was ‘off the record’ he waited until the Nagra Recorder was out of sight before he even mentioned it’s existence. Tim ponders this, remembers the historian comment and in the end he contents himself to edit down what he’s got and try to get some reaction quotes from the council. We get back to his toast smelling car, back to Panic Number and the mundane world of A roads and roundabouts.
“do you reckon you could do it?’ says Tim
“What, live in a cave? yeah mate. I do”
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