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!

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.

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.

wherever. A playful, funny and creative film I saw on Vimeo.