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Archives
Whitby is so bracing too
September 1st, 2010
Whitby was wheezing with tourists. Thousands of us clattered down the narrow streets and into the cafes. Breakfast – a bright red pot of strong Yorkshire tea and dark orange Whitby kippers, cooked to perfection and served on generous slabs of granary bread. We climbed the 199 steps to the Abbey, brought strawberry ice-creams and stared at the sea as if we had never seen it before. Children shrieked, fishing boats chugged, buskers sang and an ancient black steam engine hissed into the station, pulling a late summer excursion of cream and red carriages. Whitby is an unforgettable audio-visual experience. We soaked up the last of the August sun before the long drive south to a world of apples, filming, editing and cool autumn mists.
Glamping
August 30th, 2010
Camping never used to be like this
A week away in a quiet woodland glade in the Yorkshire countryside. Not a 13A socket in sight. No laptop. No phone. No emails. No Facebook. The only twittering to be heard was that of long tailed tits in the pine trees. Listening to owls, foxes and birdsong. Sunlight squinting through beech and oak branches. Acorns, pine-cones, squirrels and a hare. The curling smoke of a wood stove. A bracing walk along the Cleveland Way.
Time drills holes in stones
August 20th, 2010
Porlock Bay 1891 - Charles Napier Hemy
Just completed the first interview for a film about coastal change in Somerset with Philip Ashford, a wonderful maritime historian. Crunching across the vast shingle bank at Porlock he took us back two hundred years and explained how the road and several cottages had been swept away in winter storms. As placid as the bay looked, I began to visualise the corrosive power of the sea. Further on we came to the famous Porlock breach where an overnight storm had punched a vast hole through a twenty foot high shingle bank and flooded the marshland behind it. Later that afternoon the cameraman Alex Butter and I interviewed one of the local fishermen. Had he noticed any changes in his time as a fisherman? ’Well I’ve been fishing out in Porlock Bay for forty years, but in the last ten years I’ve noticed the sea has become a lot more violent and unpredictable’. You can line up all the climate change deniers that you like, but one person with local knowledge will skewer their complacency.
Four sand dunes and a funeral
August 16th, 2010
Those were the days.....
How will the coastline of Somerset look in twenty-five, fifty or indeed one hundred years time? The county is vulnerable to coastal flooding, with a great tract of the Somerset Levels protected by a narrow range of sand dunes at Berrow and Brean. The combination of a high spring tide and a low pressure system coming in from the west could raise the tide by another half metre and then the dunes would be under severe pressure. Researching for a film about coastal change in Somerset, I studied the dunes with a county councillor who showed me how the dunes have grown in the past fifty years and where the weak points are. New sand dunes have appeared held together by buckthorn, shrubs and marram grass. Behind them lies a vast city of static caravans, the main west coast railway line, the M5 and the Somerset Levels. Driving back we got talking about his work as a county councillor. ‘When I was elected I was told that Councillors got very little thanks for the work they did’ And then he laughed ‘But they said I’d be guaranteed a really good funeral’. Having once stood for our local town council in Glastonbury I know how much energy it takes just to stand for election, let alone serve at a county level, so I sincerely thanked him as he got out of the car!
Literary-sub-Mendip
August 12th, 2010
The telephone box at Westbury-sub-Mendip continues to connect people, but this time to books. As the last strands of BT wiring were stripped out, the villagers brought the iconic phone-box for £1 and transformed it into a book exchange. You read a book and return it, or better still return it with another you have enjoyed. The shelves were full on the day I visited and I had the whole place to myself. There were some very fine novels, a few books on military campaigns, geography, animal husbandry, cooking, mechanical repairs and one on bee-keeping. The great thing was being able to browse knowing that the phone would never ring.
The Lion and the Unicorn – Socialism and the English Genius
August 4th, 2010
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Great Ideas
Waterstones, York, twenty minutes before closing time. I’d gone in to find a copy of George Orwell’s political essays. The woman at the counter referred to her computer and said ‘I think you’ll find there’s a copy in the Drama department on the second floor’. I searched the shelves to no avail and asked another member of staff if she knew where I could find a copy. ‘I think it’s in the creative writing section. Wait here and I’ll go down to the basement’. On the way down she asked another member of staff who went over and consulted his computer. Soon three members of staff were searching three floors to find me one £4.99 book. Minutes later it was triumphantly plucked out of a shelf in the political biography section and handed to me with a smile. Isn’t it great when customer service exceeds your wildest expectations? On my way out I passed a glittering mound of Tony Blair’s ‘A Journey’ at half price. If I was working for Waterstones’ promotions department, I’d have plonked down a large pile of ‘Why I write’ next to the Blair’s biography……
Butt kicking
August 1st, 2010
Making a short film for a NHS funded anti-smoking project in Hammersmith, I was struck by how many people still smoke in London. We’d set up our camera outside Hammersmith tube station to capture some vox-pops as people came off the tube. It is only when you stand still for an hour and observe the habits of the people around you that you realise how many people still smoke. We talked to a number of people who’d desperately tried to give up – big time smokers with deep etch-a-sketch lines scoring their cheeks. The saddest interview of all was with a frail ballet dancer, who been smoking since the 50s and could only be interviewed in between sessions with an inhaler. But it was the brutal cynicism of the tobacco companies that finally got to me. We were shown an executive memo that had been circulated within one of the tobacco manufacturers marketing departments – ‘We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid’. When you learn that DNA starts to mutate after fifteen cigarettes, you never see them in the same light again.
High Tea and Highgrove
July 28th, 2010
Highgrove reception
It wasn’t what I had expected. A tour of the rather magnificent (and at times slightly eccentric) gardens at Highgrove House, followed by an evening reception with HRH. One hundred Friends of Mount Athos gathered to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the organisation. It seemed like light years away that I’d been on my hands and knees crawling through the snake and lizard strewn undergrowth of Mount Athos to try and undercover the path of the ancient Kaldarini (the cobbled footpaths between the monasteries) and here I was standing in a lounge suit next to Tyna meeting the patron of the organisation. He’d spent the entire day at Selly Oak meeting wounded soldiers from Afghanistan, flew back almost an hour late, walked straight into an evening gathering, spoke to every single person there and was genuinely interested in what everyone had to say. Call in what you like - royal duty, service or a lifetime of training, it was a humbling experience.
Isaac Guillory – the master fingerpicker
June 29th, 2010
In 1975 my flatmate gave me a copy of Al Stewart’s definitive folk album – Past, Present and Future. Al Stewart, a generous musician, surrounded himself with some of the very finest musical talents and gave them the space to really express their talents – Peter John Wood (keyboards), Tim Renwick (Guitar), Peter White (Guitar), Rick Wakeman (Keyboards), Dave Swarbrick (Mandolin) and Isaac Guillory (Guitar). It is hard to discern Isaac’s contribution to the outstanding guitar playing on this album, so it was an absolute delight to find a solo performance of his on YouTube. Here he is, at the very height of his musical powers, playing his trilogy ‘Trains’ to a folk-club audience that cannot have numbered more than a twenty or so.
Dave Ja Vu
June 29th, 2010
On the summit of Scafell Pike
Out of a cloudless blue sky an email arrived from an old school friend. I opened it and to my absolute astonishment saw a photograph of myself on the summit of Scafell Pike taken in 1973 – wrapped up in an early 1970s nylon jacket, complete with my trust Silva compass and high-tech walking pole. The friend sitting behind me is now a tax exile in Chile and a Lloyds of London name. It only seems like yesterday that we were at school together and he was always selling me conkers, marbles or pens. Then I realised that he was always selling me something – it was never the other way round……