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.

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”