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.

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.

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.

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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……

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.