BrianT

Fried Egg - a true story (some names changed to protect the guilty)

2011-09-14T12:05:00.002Z

Bruce Robinson must have met Egg, because Danny (Withnail & I) IS Egg.

When I was at Newcastle Uni in 1981, my allotted room-mate was an avowedly thatcherite, Daily Mail reading, public school educated son of a Surrey doctor, called Keith. He was everything my nascent, Northern working-class, left-leaning principles dictated that I should hate.
But Keith was a nice bloke. And he had a car, the only car amongst all my uni friends, a blue and grey Mk1 Ford Cortina. So I forgave him all his many faults and, to his great credit, considering his politics and my lifestyle, he forgave me mine. Keith later achieved brief fame as one of Saddam Hussain’s human shields in the first (and best) Gulf War, much to my delighted amusement.
Keith was more than just a comedy Tory Boy with a useful car though. His parents had, some years previously, paid a visit to the Northern Pennines and, on a whim, bought a vacant farm cottage high on a moorland road above Nenthead, in Upper Teesdale. And, as Newcastle was considerably nearer to Nenthead than Surrey, Keith had the keys, under loose instruction that he should pay the occasional visit “to keep an eye on the place”.
In the interests of “keeping an eye on the place”, myself and several of our friends would cajole Keith to drive us in his labouring 1972 Cortina the 40-odd miles to the cottage, as often as we could. Our group of friends included a young Bruce Robinson, who went on to write and direct ‘Withnail and I’ and Keith’s place was, in every respect, the double of ‘Crow Cottage’ in that film.
Some weekends, it would be just Keith and me, as we both liked hill-walking and the fells around there are bleak and wild, more so than any other part of England.
On one particular weekend, we’d set out on just such a hike, on one of those cold November days when the sky is so coldly blue it hurts, and the sunlight is that warm, slanted gold which lends everything, the trees and the dead bracken and the blasted heath, a burnished magnificence.
As we crossed a field, heading for the stony track climbing onto the fellside, a jouncing whine and rumble away to our right heralded the progress of an ancient green land-rover from a gate at the top of the field, which bounced on broken suspension over the molehills, to head us off before we reached the stile in the wall.
A vestige of childhood fear, drawn from a well of narrow escapes from farmers, angry at their precious hay bales being built into golden forts by urban vermin, produced a brief prickle of adrenaline.
“STOP RIGHT THERE!” shouted a red-faced voice, as the driver’s door creaked open on the looped baler wire which connected it to the rest of the vehicle. There was moss growing along the botom of the windscreen.
An artist’s impression of a Northern hill-farmer stormed towards us, exuding righteous fury from every steaming pore.
“D’yer knor this is private land?!”
“Er, yeah but there’s a footpath across it.”
“Norracross MY bloody land there in’t! There’s NO bloody footpath ‘ere!”
“Yeah there is, look.”
I showed him the red dotted line on the Ordnance Survey map.
“See? The red dotted line means it’s a public right of way.”
“And anyway” I added, expecting reason to prevail, “there’s a stile in the wall there, and another in the wall back there, so there must be a path between ‘em!”
“There’s NO BLOODY PATH ‘ere, ah don’t care WHAT the bloody map sez! The bloody map’s WRONG! Ah’ve all sorts o’ trouble wi’ fowk like you! Ye c’n clear off an’ walk on t’ road!”
He indicated the lane, up beyond the gate at the top of the field.
“Er, what do you mean ‘people like us?’” interjected Keith in his well-bred Surrey tones. I half expected him to come out with “See here my good fellow, do you realise who you’re talking to?”
The farmer jabbed a thick finger, deeply ingrained with lines of darkness, and waggled it between us, then conducted it over the surrounding land:
“Bloody hippies!”
I sensed Keith bristling at being labelled so, but he played the diplomat:
“Well, we’ll walk on the road if you insist, but you’re wrong you know. I shall write to the local rights of way officer and tell him about this, and I don’t like being labelled a hippy!”
“We’re students.” I added, helpfully.
“Ah don’t care what you are, you’re not walkin’ across ‘ere!” the farmer replied, sullen now rather than angry.
I suspect he realised we weren't hippies, based largely on Keith’s accent and visible indignation at such an appellation, but he wasn’t about to lose face, so he escorted us up the field, herding us along with his creaking green wreck of a land-rover which lurched madly behind us until we exited onto the road and the farmer could slam shut the gate. Or rather, drag shut the rotting assemblage of grey timbers which had once been a gate, and pull a loop of orange nylon string over the gatepost to secure it.
“Off you go lads” lads now!
“There’s another path a bit down t’ road.” Another path? I bite my tongue.
“It’ll tek ye to t’ same place, to t’ footbridge ovver t’beck.”
Climbing back into his cab he creaked and rattled away down the road, with a grinding of worn gears and an exhaustless roar. A smell of diesel soot hung in the cold air, as we turned and plodded along the road.

That evening, we decided to forego the local delights of the Miners arms in Nenthead, nothing to do with the possibility of The Farmer being in there of course.
Instead, Keith drove us to the fleshpots of nearby Alston, which trumpeted itself as ‘Englands highest market town’, though little did I realise how many truths resided in that simple sentence.
We chose a pub called The Blue Bell, which served a decent pint of Marston’s Pedigree, a rare ale in those days. Being a Saturday night, it was busy, and the tables soon filled up, mostly with locals, plus the odd cagoule-wearing hiker.
Around 10, a young bloke entered the pub. He had sandy, shoulder-length frizzy hair, wore an old army camouflage jacket and tattered jeans and was about our age. I only noticed him because he stood out from the conservatively dressed locals. He looked more like me, really, but he didn’t have the air of the student about him.
He bought a pint of lager and peered around the pub. His eyes fell on us and suddenly, he was making his way over. I sensed Keith’s tensing and his inward groan, as the bloke paused “Hiya, is it OK if I sit here?” indicating the single empty stool.
“Nah go on.” I replied, before Keith had chance to invent a temporarily absent sitter.
He sat down and sipped his pint. We got chatting and he said he lived in the village with a few others in a rented house. He seemed affable enough, and I was soon talking to him about music. My tastes in those days were towards 70s heavy rock and cartoon metal bands like Iron Maiden, and he seemed to share much of my enthusiasm. Keith rolled his eyes and pulled out a newspaper.
At 10.20, the landlord called last orders. I examined my meagre reserves and was debating a last pint, when Simon, the young bloke, said “Why don’t you come back to our place? I’m sure you can have a beer or something.”
Keith started to say something about having to get back but I cut in “Yeah OK, why not?” ignoring Keith’s brief glare of incredulity that I was actually going to go along with this…this...hippy, who was in all likelihood personally responsible for The Farmer's prejudice and paranoid hostility to us that very morning.
I pretended I hadn't read Keith's body language and we drank up and wandered out into a glacially cold night, stars glittering in a black sky, and a huge darkness encircling the tiny light pool of the village.
“Just up here” said Simon, indicating a short cul-de-sac, a few minutes from the pub. Obviously a newish addition to the ancient village, the houses of the cul-de-sac were the type of pebble-dashed semis which wouldn’t look out of place on some sprawling urban council estate, but which definitely looked out of place here.
We followed Simon up a short path alongside an overgrown patch of weeds which may once have been a lawn, and paused by a side door as he wrestled with the doorknob and his key.
As the door swung open, a hot wave of air washed over us, tainted with an oniony cooking smell, a hint of BO, something of the wet dog, a definite dash of patchouli oil and overriding it all, the rank smell of dope smoke.
The door opened into a small, dark hallway with lino on the floor and piles of shoes against the wall. This led through into a living room, where a black dog, with much labrador in it, wagged and slobbered over to us, giving Keith, a dog-lover, something to take his senses away from the personal nightmare of where he was.
Simon motioned us onto an old settee, its springs so worn we may as well have sat on the floor for all the resistance they offered to our weight.
As Keith fussed over the drooling dog, not taking his eyes from it, I looked around the other people present, none of whom seemed particularly concerned, or even aware, that we were there.
“This is Steph” said Simon, indicating a blonde-haired woman in jeans and with bare feet, wearing a black vest, who sat smoking a cigarette, arms around her knees, on the floor with her back to another old sofa opposite us. She was older then Simon and reminded me of Angie Dickinson. She smiled at us and waggled her fingers hello.
“And that through there is Denise…”
“Denny! Hiya!” waved a sandy haired woman, maybe in her 40s, from a doorway through which I could see bits of a kitchen. “Who are you then?”
“I’m Brian. Hi.”
“Oh, er...Keith!” said Keith.
"Hi Keith! Hi Brian!" shouted Denny, who seemed like maybe she was the only one here who spoke, Steph having not said a word at all, and who merely stared dreamily at us, or at the space we occupied, with a faint smile on her lips.
There was a third occupant of the space, also silent.
On the settee opposite ours, the one against which the saturnine Steph reclined, sat a man.
He was probably a similar age to Denny, 40-ish, with a big mane of dark hair like a collapsed afro. He looked like he’d be tall if he stood up, but was so immobile it was hard to see the join between him and the settee. He looked like he might have grown there.
He wore jeans, unfashionably flared ones I noticed, ragged at the bottom, and his feet were encased in worn leather flip-flops. A faded black teeshirt draped itself over his skinny torso.
He was looking at us, only his dark eyes moving in his face, above a long nose. He reminded me of an unwashed and heavily tranquillised Bob Dylan. Dark stubble covered his chin and his mouth was neither smiling nor unsmiling as his eyes flicked from me to Keith and back again.
He was as silent as Steph, and even less active. Here, surely, was The Farmer’s true bête noir, and probably poor Keith's too.
Keith was focussed determinedly on the dog, known as ‘Dog’ according to Simon, who by now was flopped on the other settee behind Steph. He saw me looking at the older guy and, as if he’d just remembered something, blurted:
“Oh, and this is Egg, Egbert…”
“Egg.” came a voice from the man, who barely moved his lips.
“Yeah, Egg. It’s his house, sort of. Egg? Brian and er..Keith.”
“Yeah. I know.” His accent was somewhere in North London.
He suddenly came to life, as if he’d been waiting for the formal introduction. His voice didn’t waste energy, barely rising above a monotone.
“So, Brian and Keef, wotcha doin’ round ‘ere then? You ain’t locals are ya?”
“Er no! We’re just passing through really!” said Keith, before I could let on he had the keys to a deserted cottage.
“Oh, I see.” Egg pondered on this, staring at something above our heads.
“What about you?” I ventured. “You don’t sound local either.”
“No.” murmured Egg.
Producing a plastic ice cream tub from the floor by his feet, he opened it, and extracted rizlas, tobacco and a thumb-sized lump of dope, reddish, Moroccan maybe, or Lebanese. He paused, and looked at us eyebrows rising a micron or two, like a waiter politely offering more claret:
“D’you turn on?”
“Er, ooh, er, no, no, thank you very much!” spluttered Keith, as I enthused “Yeah!” simultaneously.
Unperturbed by Keith’s evident discomfort and growing air of bug-eyed horror, Egg proceeded to cement rizlas together dexterously as he spoke, now concentrating his address largely in my direction.
“So you bin havin’ fun then, round ‘ere?”
I told him about our walk and the encounter with The Farmer. He smiled, and in the same half-tone murmur, said:
“That’s because you’re hippies. Some of the locals, they don’t like hippies.”
“Er well, I don’t know about that!” spluttered Keith, unable to contain himself at being called a hippy twice in one day.
“No man, look at your friend…Brian? Brian, yeah. Look at ‘im. Long ‘air. Patched up jeans, scruffy lookin’. You’re a hippy. Q.E.D.”
Point proven, he proceeded to heat the dope and load the enormous joint, without once looking down at what he was doing. His eyes flickered downwards from my face:
“Wot’s that on your teeshirt?”
I opened my jacket to reveal the Motorhead logo on my teeshirt. He smiled again, revealing yellowing teeth this time.
“Aw yeah, Lemmy’s band.”
He licked the spliff seam, rolling it tightly. He looked at it for the first time. It looked like a parsnip.
“You know ‘em?” I inquired. Egg laughed again.
“I know Lemmy.”
“Egg used to roadie for Hawkwind!” Denise exclaimed enthusiastically from the kitchen, where she was cooking something. I’d forgotten she was there.
“Wow, I like Hawkwind too!” I said.
“Yeah...they’re good lads...” Egg murmured, as he vanished in clouds of smoke. “...still see...Dave Brock sometimes…comes up 'ere…”
“So did you know the Pink Fairies as well?” I asked, naming Hawkwind’s Ladbroke Grove contemporaries whom I was now getting into, ten years too late.
“Fack off! I roadied for them an’ all! Larry Wallis was like…” he tailed off as if he’d fogotten he was speaking, and passed the joint to silent Steph, who now spoke:
“Guests first Egg.” and offered the smouldering parsnip to Keith, who forced a laugh and declined:
“Ooh er no, thankyou.” then looked worried as I took it instead.
Steph smiled at me and I saw she was actually quite lovely.
I didn’t smoke cigarettes, and my dope-smoking was mostly confined to occasional parties and two-skin roll-ups, not titanic constructions like the bonfire I now held between my fingers. But this was like being invited to the inner circle. This guy roadied for Hawkwind. He knew Lemmy! It would be rude not to.
I wiped my lips dry, and took a drag, sucking the smoke down. Was that the tobacco rush? Yeah. Must be. Cold skin clamminess and then I was letting it out and my hands and feet were both warm and numb at the same time, and I was hot and blushing and handing the spliff back to Egg and jesus how much had he put in that thing!
As I sank back into the sofa, Simon was sucking on the joint, Egg was back in silent mode, and Steph was looking even more beautiful. Keith was still there, but he’d sort of disappeared.
The cooking smells from the kitchen suddenly became overpowering.
I felt responsible for the silence.
“So...do you go out on the hills?” I asked, wondering why I was even asking it.
“For the mushrooms.” murmured Steph, almost inaudibly. Her voice sussurated in my ears like a breeze through long grass.
Simon grinned: “Ooh yeah, great mushroom country this!”
“Would you like some?” asked Egg, like someone’s mum asking if I wanted a piece of cake.
“Yeah, I love mushrooms.” I replied, in a voice which sounded like it came from someone else.
“Denise, could you fetch some mushrooms in!” Egg’s voice rose to a normal conversational level.
Nonetheless, Denise reappeared, bearing a biscuit tin. Fox’s Chocolate Assortment. She handed it to Egg, winked at me and then vanished back into the kitchen.
Egg took off the lid and held out the open tin: “See?”
I saw. It was full, and I mean full, of dried mushrooms, packed tightly. Thousands of stringy brown stems and withered, pointy caps.
“Er, Brian, I think we’d better be going soon!” said Keith, alarmed at the prospect of me now taking magic mushrooms with these people. I'd forgotten Keith was even there.
“Naw, you can stay here if you like!” said Simon.
“Yeah, s’ok.” said Egg, nodding slightly. Steph looked up at me and smiled slightly.
“Well, you can stay, but I have to get back!”
Keith put his big sensible conservative foot down, right in the middle of my intentions to say yes.
Why did he have to put his bad vibe on it all?
I’d have to go. If I didn’t go with him, I might stay here forever. Or at least have a problem getting back to Newcastle.
“’Ere look, take some wiv yer.” said Egg, and peered around at the side of the settee until he produced a plastic bag, which had contained bread at some point. He shook it out, then took a handful of the mushrooms and dropped them in the bag. There must have been hundreds.
All of a sudden, the monster joint, now very much shortened, was in front of me again. I took it and had a last big draw on it. Then another for good measure, before handing it back.
I stood up, because Keith was now standing, obviously determined to escape.
I couldn’t feel my limbs. I could make them work, but I couldn’t feel them. My legs felt impossibly long and my knees seemed to hinge both ways.
“Bye!” shouted Denise from the kitchen. I wanted some of whatever she was cooking, but Keith was having no more of this. We were leaving.
“See ya.” grinned Simon from the sofa.
“Bye. Come again.” said the lovely Steph, clasping my hand with both hers without getting up. I wondered if she’d had some of the mushrooms, or if she was always so dreamy. I didn't care. I loved her.
“Yeah, if you’re round ‘ere ever again, drop in, man.” murmured Egg. He didn’t get up either.
We left.
The cold air seemed like another world.
What time was it?
I rode along in my duck-walking body, following Keith along the path. I must have been going very slowly, but I just wanted to sit and look at the stars. I drifted to a halt.
“Look, you wait here, for god’s sake, and I’ll go and fetch the car!” said Keith, now back in the real world and in control. I wasn’t going to argue. I sat on what was probably a wall.
It was only ten minutes but it seemed like eternity, as my brain floated amongst the stars and the blackness glittered with promise.
As I climbed into the musty Cortina, I realised I’d left the mushrooms behind.
Ah well.

The rotting corpse of Psalter Lane

2010-01-22T14:15:00.001Z

Psalter Lane Art College is dead. Once a jewel in Sheffield's crown, a magnet for would be artists, designers, jewellery makers and film directors from all over Britain, it was swallowed up by Sheffield Poly, soon to become Sheffield Hallam University who took the decision, in 2008, to close it.

And close it they did. After years of rumours that its demise was imminent, it finally shut its doors in the summer. A skeleton of staff stayed on, moving stuff out for re-use down at the City Campus, tidying up admin loose ends until finally, in early September, the last handful of people walked out and the doors closed for the final and time. Contractors came and cut off the water and gas, though electricity remains for now.

With the removal of water and gas, the heating system, which for decades had kept the leaky buildings warm and dry, was dead. The interiors cooled down slowly, and the persistent, encroaching moisture, damp and drips from leaky rooves found itself unopposed.

So what is Psalter Lane like now? If you love the place, have fond memories of it, and decry the way it's been cast aside by the overlords of Hallam Uni, you may find some of these scenes distressing.

In late October, I had to pay a visit to the site, to inspect it and assess the risk of a fire being started there by arsonists (ie. kids who might break in). I visited all the buildings, alone, wandering through the deserted rooms and corridors. It was a weird and unsettling trip. Glad I wasn't on acid. Or am I?

I arrived just as it began to rain, on a chilly, damp afternoon, a truly leaden sky setting the tone. The two on-site security guards greeted me and let me in. They 'live' in the old caretaker's house at the back of the site. The main buildings are empty and silent.

To begin, I had a walk around the exterior, looking for obvious ways in. A few months ago, you were hard pressed to get a parking spot on the car park. Now, it lay empty, but for a few vans belonging to asbestos contractors working in the old substation on the edge of the car park

Click on the pics to see a full-sized image (they all look better full size)

Below: A Block, the orginal art college, empty for the first time in 150 years...

Below: B Block, home of the graphic designers and woodworking workshops...

Below: The car park is piled with rubbish and discarded furniture. A bonfire in the making...

Wandering around out on the open car park is eerie enough, but go round the back of the buildings and the sense of abandonment is worse, palpable. Nature, always on hand to exploit a loophole, is already seeming to dance amongst the stone and concrete.

Below: Behind A Block, vegetation running riot...

Below: a fungus, feeding on the damp wood of the fire door at rear of A Block...

...weeds gain a foothold next to a Victorian drain cover...

Below: The path between E Block and A Block, strewn with rotting furniture...

Below: The industrial, functional things, machinery, ventilation systems, which were humming with power until recently, suddenly look rusty and dilapidated...

Other industrial relics remain of a more remote past: old electrical insulators on the wall...

Below: rear of C Block, a fine piece of 1970s neo-brutalism...

Below: In places, even outside, you come across abandoned student artwork. The wooden frame is part of the 'Trebushed', a garden shed which converted into a working mediaeval siege engine (trebuchet), which was a 2008 final year degree piece...

It isn't just the old buildings which raise ghosts, real or imagined. Some of the external areas, particularly in that leaden Autumn weather, put me in mind of the sort of place you'd expect to stumble upon the speech-denyingly horrific scene of some child-murder, cold flesh and clothes scattered amidst the muddy leaves behind the concealing buildings.

Below: back of G Block...

Below: The windows of C Block staircase from outside, looking up...

In places, the drab greyness and air of silent emptiness is lightened, as here, by splashes of paint on a wooden door, a relic of a day when some art student leaned a board up against the door and splashed paint on it, Pollock-style, the paint now accompanied by the sucker roots of ivy tendrils...

Other colour comes from more industrial sources...

Below: the gnarled Victorian stonework looks old...

...but the 1970s concrete of C Block also now shows the scars and stains of its life...

C Block windows, clouded and opaque like the eyes of dead fish...

Below: E and D Blocks, and the 'quadrangle'...

...and a close-up of the rear entrance to E Block, once a smoker's haunt, now just haunted...

Rain on the roof...

Having wandered round the site, I was amazed at just how...dead it all seemed. I was used to it being such a vibrant place, a place I always looked forward to visiting. Now, it was like looking at the corpse of a dead family member. It resembled the place I knew so well, but was cold and silent.

I spent nearly an hour walking around outside, and time was moving on. I had to get inside and do my tour before darkness came. The main entrance was still decorated with the remnants of the big party which took place there back in summer, now like the xmas decorations in mid-January.

Below: Kid Acne's mural and farewell message, painted over the main entrance for the leaving party in June...

I went in, chatted to the friendly security staff, who'd opened up for me, and then I began my walk-round, alone in the echoing winter gloom of the deserted rooms and corridors.

I began with A Block, the old Victorian building which, being Grade 2 listed, will not be demolished. It used to host the library, the film theatre and a series of offices. Unfortunately the camera malfunctioned in this section so I didn't get all the pictures I wanted. I got no pics of the huge expanse of the deserted library, or the attic, which is every inch the attic in the horror short 'Drip' (see my earlier blog entry). The splendour of the Victorian rooms still peeked through the more modern imposition of the office environment, and being able to see the rooms stripped of their 21st century accoutrements was edifying. One thing which struck me was how much stuff had been left behind. Office furniture, stationery, personal nick-nacks, the place was far from being truly empty. It was as if people had left in a hurry, grabbing what they could along the way.

The other thing was the total silence. It was quiet outside, but no sound penetrated in here. I could hear every thump of my heart, and it was almost a relief when I entered a back room to be faced with a bank of still live telecoms routers, all flashing LEDs and humming relays. It was like finding life on Mars. Outside that room, there was a post-apocalyptic feel about the place, as if everyone had fled in the face of a zombie army or a plague of Black Death proportions.

The empty offices were unnerving, but the library was worse. Ever played any of the 'Silent Hill' computer games? The library was like being in a real-life version. I expected to be menaced any moment by split-headed dogs or lumbering mutants. What made it all the more poignant were the messages which departed staff had scrawled on the walls, the day they left...

Below: Click on the images to enlarge and read the scrawled messages...

My camera malfunctioned here, in the ground floor library, so I couldn't get any pics of the upstairs. I just continued my fire safety inspection. Eventually however, I fiddled with the camera and managed to get it working again, just in time to enter C Block, the former home of the fine artists. A lot of the bigger degree pieces from 2008 were still in situ, but the encroaching damp, leaky ceilings and bone-chilling, grave-like cold, were causing the hardwood parquet floors to swell and rise up in wooden billows, artificial waves breaking into pixellations of collapsed blocks.

Below: room 302, Heath Robinson guttering rigged to try and divert roof leaks out through the open window. Parquet floors destroyed by the wet...

Below: room 306 looking much as it did at the degree show in June, except for the erupting floor...

Below: student artwork in room 304...

...and in 401A...

In fact, C Block struck me, more than the other blocks, as almost a giant artwork in progress, commenting on decay, the disappearance of humanity, fear and isolation, loads of different themes, left behind by previous tenants or created by the new situation. It has to be experienced by walking around in there alone, but it speaks to you, in dozens of different voices all at once.

Below: series of pics of level 2 corridor, C Block...

The Level 2 corridor, with the familiar painted corner visible at the end...

Below: Level 2 corridor; dark and totally silent...

Below: a piece of artwork in a room on Level 1...

Below: the 'painted corner' on the C Block stairs...

From inside the building, the grimy windows offer new perspectives on parts of the outside...

From C Block, so familiar to me, I wandered through the basement studios and into D Block, former home of Metalwork and Jewellery, a single storey, one corridor building running between C Block and E Block, which used to be Printing and Photography. This section was particularly spooky. One of the security staff, a big bloke we'll call 'Bill' (because that's his name), swore he saw "something" moving across the landing of E Block stairs, as he came round the corner of the darkened D Block corridor at the stair foot. A pale mist or vague shape, it was enough (he said) to make him run back down the corridor to C Block and the main entrance. This was in my mind as I ventured into the rooms of D Block. I don't believe in ghosts, but isolation and silence, in an environment of empty rooms and silent corridors, can exert a malign influence on your imagination. I felt watched, though whether it was ghosts or just the place itself, I can't say.

Below: out back of C Block

Below: abandoned casting furnace, C Block

Below: the courtyard between C and E Blocks

Below: a thing in a cupboard, C Block basement.

Below: Mr Wilson

Below: left behind paintings display to spiders and silence

Below: The abandoned woodworking machine shops, C Block

Below: oh! Graffiti in C Block basement

Below: This huge composite portrait dominates the wall of one of the C Block studios, even now, nearly 2 years later

Below: clay head, suitably outraged at the closure

Below:Staircase windows in C Block

Below: C Block studio art

Below: C Block studios

Below: Where are they now?

Below: abandoned workbenches, with Record vices still attached

Below:Great Cthulhu waits, and dreams, in sunken C Block

D Block, the old Metalwork and Jewellery Department, ws utterly silent. The drip of a tap would have been a hammer blow there. You held your breath walking through, because the sound that came back from the cold walls was unpleasant.

Below: abandoned office, stripped of all but a chair

Moving into E Block, past the spooky, darkrooms, the print area seemed light and warm and full of sunbeams. Screen printing equipment lay untouched, destined for the skip, including the beautiful Victorian press (below).

B Block was creepy. Upstairs, the gloom of the dusk was seeping in like water and horror lurked around every corner until, suddenly, a beam of gold sunlight broke through the slaty sky and the dirty windows (below)

Below: deserted workshops in B Block

Below: The Sentinel

Update: It is now January 2010. Psalter Lane has been dead for 18 months. Over the past few weeks, a company have been employed by the university to remove all non-fixed items from the buildings. So that means that everything you see in these photos; all the benches, furniture, artwork, tools, everything that isn't bolted down, has been taken, most of it skipped, broken and nor lost forever. Most of it I guess isn't important, but what of the old victorian press in E Block? Sledgehammered to manageable chunks of cast iron and weighed in as scrap? Probably. [May 2010 update: yes it was]

Over the Yuletide holidays, a gang of people who knew exactly what they were doing broke into the buildings and methodically stripped it of lead and copper and anything else of use or value. The on-site security presumably slept through it. Is it any different to the methodical stripping-out already described? Other than sanction, I don't see much, and at least those removing the scrap metals were making some use of their spoils, not just breaking, burning or burying them.

In March, demolition contractors move in. Everything will be gone, except A Block, the original college building. I might have a chance to get on site before that happens. If I do, I'll try and take some photos.

What time is it...?

2009-08-27T17:29:00.009Z

Seems I fell asleep sometime back in December, as far as the blogosphere goes at any rate. Ah well, not much has happened/loads has happened/the Universe is a completely different place now (delete as you see fit).

Went to the dentist today. Well, I say 'the dentist' but it was the dental hospital, actually. I'm not registered with a practice in Sheffield: you can't find a NHS dentist for love nor money. This allowed me to volunteer as a patient for nervous final-year students to practice on. And it's all free! You donate your time and your teeth. They donate the expertise and the treatment. Mutualism, eh? Symbiosis. Reciprocal back-scratching.

Whatever, my ivory is in pretty decent nick, apart from a small cavity and my perennially loose crown, Left number 1 lower. It went in my mouth in summer 1981, after I damaged my teeth falling from the top of Swastika Crack, a climb on Simonside in Northumberland. I was soloing. Fell about 25-30 feet onto a pile of rocks. Knocked out, bruised and grazed but the only things broken were my teeth. Lucky boy. So lucky. Death came over, had a look at me and decided "nah.."

So yes, the crown. Loose and with an occasional foul discharge from the ugly hole it sits in. They could leave it, they said. I looked appropriately crestfallen. They could take it out, replace it with a bridge. I brightened and it was a done deal. September 14th, out comes the crown. I'll be sad to lose it, so might ask to keep it. It's been an honorary part of my anatomy for 28 years after all.

Out comes the crown, then out comes the truncated incisor it's been standing in for all these years too. Not looking forward to that, all the wrestling with pliers, blood and crunching, then the hole and the gap. The gap will be interesting. I will have to deliver training courses with it, lending me a hissing lisp like the cartoon Lancelot (Sssssire!). It'll give me a piratical edge, perhaps, and once the ugly hole heals over, I might quite like it.

Sometime before xmas though, they intend to fit me with a bridge; another kind of artificial tooth, fixed to one of its neighbours, to restore my smile to its flawed glory. My student dentist is called Sayeda (possible sp.)

Some folk hate the dentist, or the treatment anyroad. I like it, usually. Like the hairdresser or the masseur. I like to lie and be pampered. Being given attention. I came out of there relaxed and calm, therapised, and with a smile on my face.

On the way home, I found a buddleia with flowers of the richest purple, just up the road, much like this one above. I pulled off a heeled cutting and poked it into a pot of compost when I got home. As I watered it, direct from the water butt tap, I saw that the water was full of freshwater shrimps! Little amphipods, Gammarus. The water butt is full of them. How they got there, I have no idea. The only thing that's gone in there is rainwater, so somehow they must have come with the rain, perhaps washed off a bird's leg or something.

Above: a pair of freshwater shrimps yesterday

Soft bugger that I am, I feel sorry for them, as they end up being watered into the various tubs and pots on the patio, to die and dry in the air. I'm planning to run the water through a sieve and put the shrimps in the pond and stream, to boost the community diversity, and provide food for the fish I suppose.

Best of Kendal Mountain Film Festival Day 2

2008-12-04T06:42:00.004Z

It was the second evening of Matt Heason's 'Best of Kendal' roadshow, which for Monday and Tuesday had set up a high camp in Sheffield's cosy Showroom cinema, home to Kendal's precocious cousin, ShAFF.

Jude and I ventured from the cold comfort of our overpriced lagers in the otherwise Ikea-comfy surroundings of the bar, to sit right on the front row, for the full-on IMAX effect, dude, yeah?

As with Monday's films, these were a varied bunch. First up was Journey of a Red Fridge, directed and produced by Lucian Muntean and Nataša Stankovica. A hard-to-place docu about a 17 year old Nepalese boy, Hari, carrying a Coca-Cola fridge down from the high mountains to the buzz and fume of Pokhara to be repaired. All so he could earn some money to supplement the peanuts he earns from portering for expeditions (5 cents a day!)

Along the way he meets friends and relatives, fellow travellers and the odd westerner. All are gracious, open and warm, with little of the guardedness and mistrust which now seems to permeate our culture here in England. At one point, he encounters two teenage girls bearing heavy baskets of hay (on a head-strap, as is the custom). One is dark-skinned, obviously of Indian ancestry. The other has the asiatic, Tibetan-looking features of a Nepali. Both are beautiful by western standards, and both behave exactly as teenage girls do the world over, flirting with Hari, whilst laughing at the 'tourists' making the film, with their funny clothes (the Nepalis refer to all westerners as 'tourists', even the climbers, who for some reason like to think of themselves as being above that categorisation).

Running through the film, pinning together this strange road-trip, is the powerful desire of Hari to earn enough money to buy a good education and to escape from the life which is set out for him, earning subsistence wages as a porter. At one point, we see him squirm as his elderly, infirm father, whom he hasn't seen for some time, virtually demands money from Hari, who is torn between his love and loyalty for his father, and his need to save what money he has to further his dreams.

Whether Hari ultimately achieves what he sets out to do, we never find out. In the more prosaic journey of the fridge, he reaches Pokhara and the fridge is repaired, as Hari sits on the dusty step outside, in the traffic fumes, musing on his future.

For our part, we see the spectacular landscape he lives in, the beauty of it, and we ask, 'why would he want to leave that place, those people, their culture?' But to Hari, it represents hardship, poverty and a trap from which he must escape. We wish him success in his journey.

That was followed by a 2 minute short animation called Climber, directed and produced by Carlos Villarreal Kwasek, which is about an ice climber, soloing a hard route, who has a moment of doubt and fear, and has to face, quite literally, his inner demon. Shown at ShAFF this year, it benefits from the big screen but you can watch it in its entirety here.

The third film, directed and produced by Justine Curgenven, This is The Sea 4 - Circumnavigation of New Zealand, is another road trip, a home movie of sorts, following Justine Curgenven and Barry Shaw as they attempt to paddle sea kayaks 1700 miles around the South Island of New Zealand. The film shows the hardhips they encounter, both from the sea (tide rips, heavy swells and the killer surf) and from the land (sand flies and a decomposing dead whale right by their campsite). It also shows that two people, ordinary brits like us, can embark on a huge expedition like that, entirely self-supported, and pull it off, making it look like any other kayaking trip.

The fourth film was for my money the best of the 'action' films. Taken from Hot Aches Productions 'Committed Vol. 2', 'The Walk of Life' follows Matlock climber James Pearson as he works to complete the first ascent of the route of that name on North Devon's Hartland Point. The route climbs straight up a blank, rippled slab of shale(?), for almost a full rope length (50m). He describes it as his 'silly obsession' and the route has been tried and eyed by the likes of Johnny Dawes and other stars of the modern era, all unsuccessfully, though these early inspections/attempts left a legacy of rusting pegs in the tiny overlaps and slots which occur sporadically on the huge slab.

James, to his eternal credit, 'gives it a facelift', removing the pegs, some of which are little more than rust anyway. In doing so, he creates a line which is terrifying in its blankness and its boldness, and commits himself to what he must know will be a fearfully exposed and run-out lead.

We see him cleaning the holds on abseil, trying moves; just enough of that to give us a flavour of his approach to the lead. Then, without further ado, he is on the route, having to climb the first 10m just to get his first piece of gear, a psychological wire which he admits wouldn't hold a fall. He works higher and higher, now a long way above the boulders on the shore, adrift in a vertical grey sea. Two thirds of the way up, he loses it. Something, a foot slips, a finger loses purchase, he's off, and he falls. And falls. He takes one of the longest lead falls I've ever seen, down the steep slab, maybe 15, 18m or more. That attempt is over.

He returns later, mentally and physically armed for another try. He shows no sign that his big fall has affected him, as he works his way back to his high point, then passes it, the cliff top betraying its closeness by the tufted lichen growing on the rock around him. He is now in a terrifying place, but close to safety. A last tentative move and he is there, whooping, hugging his girlfriend, whilst poor Rich Mayfield, belaying below, scampers off the rocks to escape the incoming tide. E12! That's the grade he gave it. Time will tell whether that sticks but whatever grade it settles at, it's an incredible line (or lack of a line), inescapable, committing and frighteningly bold.

The last film of the evening was Hand Cut, directed and produced by
Nick Waggoner, about the AAAHsome (dude) powder skiiing on the high peaks of the Colorado Rockies. Graceful, almost balletic footage of skiers and snowboarders is accompanied by suitably subtle music, with none of the fist-thrusting metal edge of other films of the genre. Cut into the film are voice-overs from old-timers who lived and worked in these mountains when they were still frontier mining towns, giving the contrast between the hardship of that environment back then, and the way it has become a playground now, for the bold and the wealthy. The film tells us very little, outside the grizzled voices of the pioneers, but the majesty of the swooping figures surging through the vertical oceans of powder holds us spellbound, like watching big wave surfers on a frozen wave of snow and rock. Almost made me want to ski.

DRIP - you wanna see something really scary?

2008-10-19T14:42:00.006Z

Are you the sort of person who finds it scary, being in a house on your own? The darkness of the empty rooms upstairs. The shadows. The silence, broken by unexplained creaks and muffled bumps from rooms you know are empty. Ever get that fear? That fear which defies logic and stops you going up those stairs, or which makes you glance up at the loft trapdoor as you cross the landing?

Yeah? You one of those people? If you are, then you need to watch this...

'Drip' was a short film, only 10 minutes long, which was shown oh, maybe ten years ago now, late one night on Channel 4. It went unnoticed by most people, but not by me. And now, after years of looking fruitlessly for it, here it is, popping up on Youtube. I suggest you watch this when you're alone in the house, and it's dark outside. Remember how 'The Blair Witch Project' is just a big laugh when you're with your mates, but how it assumes a completely different mantle if you watch it alone at night? Same here.

It's only short, but it has a powerful psychological fear at its heart, which taps into something primeval in us.

By the way, 'You wanna see something really scary?' comes from the opening scene of 'Twilight Zone - the Movie', which was the only scary part. If you haven't seen/don't remember it, here it is...

A Garden of Mud and Stone: Part 2

2008-10-16T10:05:00.009Z

Hi folks. Sorry it's been so long since my last post! Things have got in the way. I'm too busy at work; I've been editing Jude's soon-to-be-published book 'Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law' and working on the garden as well. On top of that, I've had flu (the seasonal variety, not the much-dreaded H5N1!), necessitating three days off work. Returning to work once I began to improve, I then was alarmed to find myself relapsing, quickly becoming even more ill than I was before. I was diagnosed with a bacterial chest infection and instructed to stay off work the rest of the week and "take it easy". I think blogging counts as 'taking it easy' so here goes.

Once I'd explored the garden and ideas had begun to creep like rampant slime moulds through the recesses of my mind (nice simile, eh?), it was obvious that the first job was to clear the crap at the bottom of the garden. The previous occupants had simply used the bottom ten yards or so as a dump, piling it high with hedge clippings, timber offcuts from DIY projects, broken patio furniture, plant pots, tree branches, soil, stones, old bricks and broken concrete. It was a mess. The hawthorn hedge marking the boundary of the garden, where it meets the woods, was buried under this ton of shit, to the point where I didn't think it was even alive.

One of the first things I did was set light to the dry prunings and twiggy rubbish, which formed a barrier some four feet high, across the garden. This was very dry and the flames raced through it in seconds, reducing it in height and saving me a lot of work. I stamped the fire out before it reached the healthy hedges on either side, but had cause to regret the fire, when I discovered that beneath the mountain of rubbish were some perfectly healthy hawthorns, bent horizontal by the weight. Unfortunately, these got scorched and a couple of them never recovered.

There was still a hell of a lot to shift, so I got one of those garden incinerators from B&Q; one of those metal dustbins on legs, with a chimney in the lid. Know the ones? They are an ace way to burn stuff quickly and in a controlled way. For several days, I fed mine with the woody rubbish from the garden. It burned it up as fast as I could throw it in. All the plastic, metal and non-combustible stuff, I bagged up and took to the local tip.

Above: me burning the twigs and rubbish in my incinerator

It took me a couple of weeks altogether but I eventually got it down to bare soil. I lifted up the poor, flattened, scorched hawthorns, staking them until they could stay upright. Only two died as a result of my fire. The rest formed a fine, if leggy, hedge which was just begging for a man with a billhook to get cracking and lay it; a job for the autumn.

It was good to be doing this stuff. Moving into a new house is all very exciting but it's really only when you start getting to grips with the soil and the growing things out there that you begin to feel some sort of bond with the place. This was enhanced by the fact that our garden is so long and at the bottom, you are, quite literally, in the woods. Going down there from the house is like making a little journey to a different place and, when you're down there, you get a sense of being watched, not by neighbours, as might normally be the case, but by the trees, the birds, the unseen creatures out there. By the woods themselves, which I'm sure some of you will understand.

Once I'd cleared the bottom of the garden, I left it to its own processes for some weeks, whilst Jude and I converted the house into our home. When I came back to it, it was well into Autumn. The early November winds were bringing blizzards of brown and yellow leaves down, covering the ground in deep drifts. Sitting at the foot of the garden, the woods suddenly sounded echoey, empty. The air smelled different, now carrying a rich perfume of decay, laced with the exhalations of fungi, as contrasted with the oxygen pumped out by the green trees just weeks before.

I always reckon that you can tell when autumn arives, irrespective of 'official' starting dates, or of the onset of so-called 'autumnal' weather. The real measure of it is when, quite suddenly, over the space of a week or two, the trees, the big trees of the woods, stop breathing out. That change in the air, as their oxygen production shuts down for the winter, is the real herald of autumn.

That change is married to a change in the woodland soil, too. In summer, through into the weeks leading up to Autumn, any rain falling in the woods is quickly sucked up by the thirsty trees and other plants. The soil never really gets saturated, except during freakishly heavy rains. Come autumn however, the trees are going to sleep. They aren't photosynthesising. They are busy pulling all the goodness back out of their leaves, into their branches and trunks and roots, to store and re-use next year, leaving the leaves empty, the green chlorophyll removed, browns and yellows and reds of unwanted pigments and dead cells painting their drying, rustling remains. The trees seal off the join at the base of the leaf stalk, and it eventually drops off, blown by the wind, to fertilise the soil, the tree eventually feeding on itself as it takes up the nutrients released from its own decomposed foliage.

When this process starts, the trees no longer need the water. They no longer take it up and liberate the oxygen from the water molecule, releasing it to sustain our lives and those of all animals. When the rain falls, it sits there in the soil, only a few evergreens staying awake to drink, and to keep watch over their sleeping cousins. The soil becomes wet, a different wetness to that which you normally encounter in summer. That, and the change in the air, are the true signs that Autumn is here.

Most of us who live in urban areas, and many even in rural areas, have lost that connection with the seasons; our ability to smell the onset of Autumn. Not so long ago, almost everyone working out in the woods and fields would have known that smell, those signs, and would have nodded to themselves and checked their store of firewood against the hardships of the months ahead.

Spring is the same. You know Spring is here, not because you have a few warm days, or it's the 21st of bloody March, or because daffodils are out but because, all of a sudden, some time in March, the woodland soils dry out. What has been wet and cold, sticky and dead, becomes, over the space of just a couple of days, merely damp, seemingly warmer and somehow filled with life. It's hard to describe in words but...it's as if something has suddenly sucked up all that standing water from the winter-sodden ground. Which, of course, is what has happened. The big trees have woken from their winter sleep. The sleeping giants have woken thirsty, and they immediately begin to drink up all that rain and snow-melt. The breaking of the buds comes some days after this initial explosion of invisible activity but is, to most people, the first visible sign of life in the trees. For days leading up to that, however, the water being sucked up from the ground by these giants goes rushing up, through their trunks, to swell the buds and unfurl new leaves to the warming, life-giving sun. It even makes a sound that you can hear - the pulse of the living tree!

It's at this time, given a good reading of the signs, that certain trees can be tapped, bled of a little of their sap, which can be boiled down to make syrup (that's how Maple Syrup is made) or fermented into a delicate wine. The sap rises strongly enough to do this only for maybe a week, ten days at most, each year, until the buds break when it slows to a comparative trickle. To draw sap, you have to be able to read the signs. Tree hugger? You may laugh at the notion, but I know things that most people don't. I've rediscovered them, just by making connections, listening, smelling, observing the lives of things around me.

Anyway, where was I? Oh aye. Autumn in the garden. Sorry about the digression, but the woods are such a barometer of the seasons I just had to wander off into a bit of a Jack Hargreaves.

The hedge along the bottom boundary of the garden caught my attention. It was tall; some of the hawthorns were perhaps twenty feet high. But it was also gappy and leggy. Anyone could just walk into the garden through the gaps. What I wanted was a solid, thorny hedge; a living barrier to people, but not to wildlife. But, crucially, I also wanted to be able to get out into the woods whenever I pleased. So I needed a hedge with a gate set into it, Secret Garden style.

Outside the hedge, the slope of the garden flattens off, right at the top of a steep bank, dropping down to a small beck (a stream, to non-Yorkshire folks. Bloody off-comers!). The top of the bank was crowded with a tangled growth of a nondescript shrub, something like an old privet, with straggly roses growing through it. To help the hedge, I had to get rid of that first, so I set to with loppers and bowsaw, burning the still-green offcuts in the incinerator, until the top of the bank was clear, letting lots of light in (or as much as the overhead sycamores, ash, lilac and spruce would allow!).

Many years ago, in the 1970s, a moody teenage Brian used to spend a considerable proportion of his weekends undertaking a variety of practical conservation projects, in the Tong-Cockersdale Country Park, just South of Pudsey. I was a member of the Tong-Cockersdale Volunteers, or TCV. We were based in the old Stables Block of Tong Hall, which was then a public museum owned by Bradford Council (they later sold it off, scandalously, to become a 'Business Park', and the Stables Block became a private home).

The TCV were affiliated to the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, or BTCV (patron; Prince Charles). Indeed, should any BTCV members read this, I and my TCV colleagues were the first people to go and have a look at Hollybush Farm, then derelict, as a potential Northern HQ for the BTCV, who wanted to move out of their tiny place on Copley Road, Doncaster, to somewhere bigger. We were impressed. Our Head Ranger, Bill Shaw (who later became a Green MP, I believe), recommended it to the BTCV and the rest is history.

Anyway, whilst normal teenagers were drinking cider in parks and bus shelters, talking about imaginary girls they'd shagged, and mugging old ladies, I was out in the countryside, learning drystone walling, hedge-laying, fencing and footpath construction. Brilliant stuff, and I'm forever grateful to Bill and the all the rest (see list below) for giving my adolescence such an odd and lasting spin.

What the hedge needed was the application of my rather rusty hedge-laying skills, something I'd only done once since the end of the 70s, when I laid a huge hedge alongside the allotments where I used to have a plot, in Pudsey.

For the uninitiated, hedge-laying involves cutting partway through the basal stem of a healthy hedge tree or shrub, in such a weay that it can be bent over and 'laid', literally. Adjoining stems can be laid in turn, until one is left with a strong, interwoven, stock-proof hedge of horizontal stems, sometimes supported by stakes. It will regrow and is almost infinitely renewable. Look at any old hawthorn hedge and you'll probably be able to see some gnarled old stems at the base which are laid along horizontally, with new growth coming out vertically from them. That's where a hedge was laid, perhaps generations ago. And that's what I chose to do with ours, where many householders would have replaced it with a short-lived fence or just filled the gaps with wire. The old ways are the best. They didn't evolve and last for centuries without good reason, you know.

So I laid the hedge, all the way around the bottom of the garden. I have a small collection of billhooks, the choping tool used for this practice, because I love them; they are an tool which is redolent with history, and can be picked up for a few quid at car boot sales or on ebay. Go back four hundred years and you'd find men using billhooks identical to those in use today (indeed, the mediaeval military bill - a heavy spiked blade on the end of a long pole, was developed from the billhook). And to make it more fascinating, there are myriad regional variations on the blade shape and length, and each manufacturer had their own patterns within those regional styles. Lovely things, billhooks.

So I got to use my billhooks, which was fantastic. To begin though, I used loppers to trim bushy side-growth off the hedge, and to reduce the height of the tallest stems (which also encourages new growth and the production of defensive thorns). This made the laying easier, as some of the larger bushes were pretty big and heavy and, of course, covered in heavy thorns!

Above: this is from a later stage in the garden, but clearly shows the recently laid hedge behind me
I'm right handed, so it was easier for me to lay left to right, using the billhook in my right hand. It took me, all told, a whole weekend to do. A good hedge-layer would have taken half a day, probably!

A garden of mud and stone - part 1

2008-09-07T10:12:00.016Z

When we moved into our house in May 2004, we didn't do so because of the house, an unremarkable 1930s semi. We did so because of its location, on a quiet, almost semi-rural backstreet, some three miles South of Sheffield city centre, and its situation. The street sits in the S8 postal district, which encompasses Woodseats, Heeley, Meersbrook, Norton Lees, Meadowhead, Norton and Beauchief.

It sits within an easy drive or cycle ride of the Eastern edge of the Peak District, which was important and, even more importantly for us, short of money as we were/are, it was (and remains) one of Sheffield's relatively 'undiscovered' areas, in terms of its housing potential.

Whereas areas like Nether Edge, Hunter's Bar, Walkley and Crookes have been colonised by incomers, looking for good houses in a nice area, well served by amenities and transport options, the S8 districts are only just coming to people's attention in that respect. The housing slump has put a temporary halt to any potential influx of house-buyers but I can see this part of the city becoming one of the main areas of interest once the market picks up again.

Well, I digress: I'm not blogging about the housing slump and the up and coming suburbs of Sheffield. Nope, what I want to say about our house is why we are here; what moved us to buy it in the first place.

We'd sought long and hard for a house we could afford. I, being from Pudsey, had few preconceptions about where I wanted to live in Sheffield. Jude however, had fixed ideas about that matter, wanting a house close to Nether Green, where her last house had been, so as to be close to her son, and also to the people she knew and felt comfortable with, to her area.

But the houses over in Nether Green and nearby suburbs were expensive; too much so for us. We had to look further afield. One day, hard at work in Leeds, I ventured onto an Estate Agent's website to look at houses on the market in Sheffield, and came across this one. It was Monday morning, and the house had just been added to the website. I rang Jude, who showed little interest, it being miles away from where she wanted to live. Well, a 15 minute drive or an hour's walk anyway.

But it was affordable and the description enticingly said "Backs onto woods". That last statement was enough leverage to get Jude interested enough to go and view it. We did so on the Tuesday, negotiating unfamiliar streets and driving past the house twice, before we identified it as the one we wanted to see.

The house was nice enough; a bit small, but enough for two of us and two old cats. We made an offer the very next day. The couple selling were desperate to move, and wanted a quick sale, so accepted our offer of the asking price immediately. What had really swayed us, and particularly Jude, was not just the price, nor the location, nor even the house itself, but its physical situation and what we saw, as we looked beyond the house to what lay behind it.

The house sits, somewhat paradoxically, in a tiny valley, which itself is high on a hill, some 3 miles from, and 350 feet above, the city. No risk of flooding here.

The house sits on a scarp of sandstone lying just a few feet under the soil, on a steep slope which runs down into the little valley. Out at the front, a tiny, paved patio overlooks the street and the long drystone wall opposite, and gives no hint of what lies behind the house.

The valley is bounded by broad ridges on three sides, and itself runs down towards the distant city. This has a peculiar acoustic effect, whereby the traffic noise from the various trunk roads, which run less than a mile away in three directions, barely register here, being deflected by the aforementioned ridges. Conversely, the small valley serves to channel the sounds of the city centre up the hill to us, so that on a Saturday afternoon the roars of the crowd at Bramall Lane reach our ears, and we can hear the clang and boom of distant forges away on the East of the city. But overall, we are in a quiet pocket of the land, something we never anticipated when we moved here.

On an average evening, the ambient noise is dominated by the song of birds, the sound of occasional passing cars on the street outside, neighbour's voices or music from back-garden socialising, and the wind in the trees.

Ah yes, the trees. The trees are probably the real reason we moved here.

Go through the house, and out through the sliding doors at the back, and you emerge onto a flagged patio, some 20 by 25 feet, as big as the entire garden for some houses of this vintage. This, in turn, leads to a couple of steps down onto a timber decked area, 10 feet by 20 feet, bounded on its downhill side by a wooden balustrade.

This is what we saw when we first viewed the house, as we looked out of the patio doors. And, nice though it was, it was what lay beyond that which really fired our imaginations and sold the house to us.

The decking is perched atop heavy poles, some 6 feet above the top end of a steeply sloping garden. A long, steeply sloping garden; altogether, the garden extends over 130 feet from the back wall of the house, being around 22 feet wide along its length.

The bottom of the garden is invisible from the house because, as the Estate Agent's blurb said, it "backs onto woods", to the extent that the trees swallow the garden. In addition, because of the steep slope, the house itself lies level with the canopy of the trees. Even though the woods are just a narrow strip, Ashes Wood, which is an offshoot of the larger Carr Woods (see my blog article about these woods), they are all we can see, at least when the trees are in leaf, as we look out from the back of the house.

The trees consist of numerous sycamores, some of them old and huge, with crazed and shaggy bark, so unlike the smoother bark of their younger cousins, oaks of various vintages, a scattering of silver birches, some giant ashes and venerable willows, and an underclass of hazel, elder, holly alder and hawthorn. Elsewhere in the woods are giant beeches, at the northern extent of their range, and the odd yew.

So, we bought the house. But this blog article ain't about t' bloody 'ouse, it's about t'garden. It were t'garden wot med us buy t'place, and wot really fired up me imagination, as ah stood an' looked arr it that day when wi went t'view t'place.

S'cuse my lapsing into dialect. I'm from Pudsey you know.

The garden, when we first moved in, was barely worthy of the name. The only kempt parts were the fairly new patio and decking: the rest of the garden, the other 100ft or more of it(!), consisted of a coarse grass and weed-strewn slope, with a few remnant shrubs and a clump of rhubarb, defiantly reminding me of long-past cultivation. This slope ran down the hill, past a huge weeping willow, to where an Anderson Shelter still stood, relict of the era of the house's birth at the outbreak of WW2, when it was intended to protect the occupants from German bombs.

The garden continued for perhaps 25 feet beyond the shelter, but this entire expanse was a no-man's land of weeds, rubbish, hedge-clippings, broken plant pots, dead branches and other detritus, so deep and tangled that it was a fight to make a way through/across it all, to reach the true termination of the garden. This was marked by a series of concrete posts, which had once carried a strained wire fence, but were now relegated to the role of boundary markers.

More interestingly, the boundary was also marked by a hawthorn hedge, leggy and gappy, and with most of its semi-mature bushes half buried and bent horizontal by the weight of crap plied against and on top of them. Most were still alive though, green foliage fizzing with life amidst the rot.

Stepping past the struggling hawthorns brought me to the rounded top of a steep bank, where the ground dropped away into what can only be described as a ravine, along the bottom of which, maybe 20 feet below, ran a little beck. On the opposite, even steeper bank, bluebells and ferns carpeted the ground under the trees. That bank rose, 25-30 feet, to meet a ribbon of a footpath contouring along through the woods, the angle above that easing, flattening out, until rising steeply again to meet a high mesh fence, marking the perimeter of playing fields belonging to the University of Sheffield.

Looking at all this, at my new playground, ideas popped to the surface of my mind like bubbles in lemonade, most bursting uselessly, but some floating there, coalescing around three immutable factors:

We have no money
The garden lies on a steep slope
The woods are full of stuff

These three facts are what led the garden to become what it is now. If you're interested in gardens, then revisit the blog and I'll tell the story. I have lots of pictures too, though unfortunately none of the garden as it was before I began to work on it.

It was late August 2004 before I even put a spade in the ground and well into 2005 before I began, in earnest, to form clear ideas in my head, and to begin to translate them into a physical reality.

One of my great personal weaknesses, almost to the point of inability, is concrete, scheduled, detailed planning. I tend to form ideas which become vague plans or intentions, and which I often begin work on without benefit of timescales or precise details. They develop organically, evolving and mutating as they go, depending on what problems may arise or whether my often unpredictable materials behave as I originally envisaged. My initial 'plans' were:-

Clear the rubbish from the bottom of the garden, burning the woody stuff and binning everything else, unless I saw a use for it.
Rescue the hawthorn hedge and lay it, traditionally.
Dig away the soil at the bottom of the garden to make a flat area, where I could build a shed and have a workspace for woodland crafts, woodcarving and the like.
Terrace the rest of the garden, to a greater or lesser extent, dividing it informally into 'zones', becoming wilder and more 'woodsy' as one progresses down the garden.
Have a pond, somewhere amidst all that.

That was my starting point. I had, effectively, a budget of bugger all and no materials other than what I could find or scrounge. What I did have, however, was a collection of good tools, a fertile imagination, physical ability and some of the skills needed to cultivate my ideas to fruition. Occasional injections of cash from unexpected sources enabled the odd luxury in terms of materials I mightn't otherwise have been able to afford, and allowed certain bottlenecks in progress to be overcome but, generally, I worked with found materials and made it up as I went along!

The garden has been one of my passions since moving here and, even now in 2008, it still is. It has a long way to go before completion, and continues to evolve, guiding me as much as I guide it.

I should have told this story from the beginning perhaps, but I'm a relative newcomer to blogging, and was certainly not blogging when we moved in here. My partner, Jude, has described parts of the garden and its evolution, on her blog. It's elicited such interest from people that I decided I'm going to tell the tale myself, going right back to the start of it all. I'll do it in instalments, recalling what I did and how the ideas became reality, and I'll continue, once we're up to date, so that the continuing evolution of the garden is broadcast to anyone who may have an interest in such things.

The significance of the garden's location and situation will become ever more apparent as the episodes unfold, as will our lack of disposable income. With ample money, there is no way that the garden would have ended up the way it is and is becoming. Poverty is the artist, every bit as much as I am. Hopefully I can show you that, even with almost nothing, you can create a fantastic garden, and that the resultant garden will be all the better for it, because you'll be pushed into using that most powerful and creative of the tools at your disposal; your imagination.

I intend to tell the story of how this...

Was turned into this...

I am The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Waters...

2008-06-20T09:01:00.004Z

When I was a kid, in the early 70s, there were a series of Public Information Films aimed at children, mainly to do with learning to swim, staying away from railways and deep water, and not taking sweets off strange men. Some of them were genuinely disturbing, and probably wouldn't be allowed on telly these days in case they traumatised the kiddies, which perhaps wouldn't be a bad thing.

This one used to give me nightmares...

Lots of people felt the same about that one. For years it worked, and dirty, deep-looking water terrified me, and I kept away, unless there were lots of mates around to boost my confidence.

Another one I was fond of was 'Charley says...' which was a series of two or three, aimed at preventing young children being abducted, raped and butchered by sinister strangers. This was immediately in the wake of the horrific Moors Murders, where Ian Brady, aided and abetted by Myra Hindley, tortured and killed a number of small children, burying their little bodies on the moors above Saddleworth in West Yorkshire.

Charley was a stripey, animated cat, who spoke to his small boy companion in a kind of secret cat language. he was much cleverer than the boy, recognising the man in the park for the sick pervert that he was.

For a while, me and my mates used to talk to each other in Charley style. Not for long though.

This is the first in the 'Charley...' films...

I like the way "the man" walks.

Not only were we not to go off with men whose legs bend the wrong way, we were also to stay away from matches, according to our inarticulate feline guardian...

or teapots (!)...

stoves...

going away somwhere without telling your mummy...

and water, obviously, in case you meet a terrifying phantom in a monk's habit, who will make matches, hot teapots and paedophiles seem like a holiday, as your nightmares become reality...

The Charley ads, of course, formed the basis for The Prodigy's first big hit 'Charly' (note the mis-spelling), back in the late 80s. Still a stonking tune...

As for the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Waters, on YouTube, I found that someone has set it to a drum 'n' bass mix...

I'll be BACKBACKbackbackback......!

RIP Cyd Charisse

2008-06-18T07:37:00.012Z

The woman with the million dollar legs died last night aged 86, in hospital, after suffering a heart attack on Monday. At the height of her fame her gorgeously long legs were allegedly insured for a million dollars (she later revealed that to be a publicity stunt by the studio).

She was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas in 1921, and began dancing with the Ballet Russe as a teenager.

She fell in love with, and married, a young French dancer, Nico Charisse, whom she met whilst on a European tour and who had been her dance teacher in Los Angeles. They married in Paris in 1939, providing Cyd with the surname which would later become so famous.

Her appearance dancing a ballet sequence in the musical 'Something to Shout About' in 1943, attracted the attention of the MGM studio. MGM gave her a seven-year contract and also (as they did in those days) changed her name, adapting her childhood nickname, Sid, to "Cyd".

Her great forte was her dancing, and her natural habitat was the lavish song and dance spectaculars of the 40s and 50s. Although I personally aren't keen on musicals, I can watch her in anything, and the dance sequences in films such as 'Silk Stockings' and 'The Bandwagon' are mesmerising, even for me. She was an undeniably beautiful woman, exuding a lithe, animal grace in her athletic dance sequences. It was often said of her that she wasn't a very good actress, something also said about Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. I could argue that point; something to do with them all being beautiful and great dancers, and the jealous sniping of lesser mortals. But I won't.

Whatever you think of her acting, you cannot fault her dancing. Just watch this scene from 'The Bandwagon', featuring Cyd and Fred Astaire.

Want more? How about this, from 'Singin' in the Rain', featuring Gene Kelly. From a gorgeous red dress, to a gorgeous green one...

In later years, after the demise of the mucical, and the hollywood bias against starring actresses over 40, her career waned. She was reduced to appearing in shit such as 'Warlords of Atlantis'.

Good bye Cyd. Your legs will still go on forever.

Congratulations Manchester United!

2008-05-22T08:05:00.005Z

Bet you didn't expect to hear that coming from a Leeds fan eh?

Well whatever, I watched perhaps the most exciting European Cup Final match of modern times last night, and loath though I am to admit it, the best side won. They were only just the best side though, by a whisker, but I felt they deserved it.

High points and low points?

Ryan Giggs, whom I've always admired, breaking professional misery-guts Bobby Charlton's club record number of appearances, when he came on late as a sub. Nice one Giggsy. If only you'd been English instead of Welsh, what might have been...sigh...

Didier Drogba blaming everyone but himself, every time he cocked up, and typically play acting outrageously, feigning agony every time someone made a bit of physical contact with him. This from a huge man, built like an oak tree.

John Terry's heartbreak at losing Chelsea the match when he slipped and blew his penalty. I felt genuinely sorry for him.

Carlos Tevez, playing like a terminator, unstoppable and determined, for me the man of the match, for all Ronaldo's flowery skill.

Ronaldo literally dancing round opponents, seemingly touching the ground only fleetingly, as though he weighed no more than a feather. Love him or loathe him, you have to admire him.

Wayne Rooney's anonymity throughout almost the whole game. What's happened to the British Bulldog Chewing a Wasp? Where was he? The boy wonder of Everton and his early ManUre appearances was worryingly (from an England perspective) ineffective.

Joe Cole's head-slapping histrionics when the linesman failed to award the blues a (deserved) corner. Ho ho.

The ManU players applauding the Chelsea players as they trudged up in the belting rain, to collect their loser's medals and crackerjack pencils.

Avram Grant standing in the deluge, hugging a disconsolate John Terry, his suit darkening as the rain soaked into it, looking like a man comforting his own son. Touching.

The mediaeval style crimson and gold painted executive seats, which resembled the sort of throne-like seats rich robber barons and suchlike might have sat on at major jousting tournaments in the 14th century. Roman Abramovich was sitting there.

There were loads more; the certainty that Nicolas Anelka would miss his penalty. You just knew it, as he stepped up to the ball, his body language that of a man who didn't believe in himself.

One last point: when Chelsea, and then Man United, all trooped up to shake hands with Michel Platini and the rest of the UEFA bigwigs, and to collect the trophy in the latter case, there was, strangely and slightly mystifyingly, a young woman, in beautiful national costume, standing in the row of football and Muscovite dignitaries. The players and club officials mounted the platform and shook hands with, hugged or spoke to, every man along the line of suits. The girl stood there, applauding the players, smiling bravely, as every single one of them ignored her completely.

It wasn't as if she was stood at the back, or right at the end; she was right there, prominent in the line-up. Her costume was magnificent, and made more so, flanked as it was by drab, if expensive grey suits. She herself was stunningly beautiful, so much so that the oversized, vulgar trophy that is the European Cup was completely outshone by her proximity. Not one of the players even looked at her, or offered a comment on her fantastic costume, or even acknowledged that she existed. Football eh? It's (still) a man's world.

Of course, the media this morning is predictably full of photos of the players gurning and waving their giant silver phallus at the crowd, but the invisible token girl proudly wearing her national costume can just be seen in this image (below) over on the far left...

Screen YOUR film at ShAFF 2009

2008-05-04T21:33:00.007Z

Are you a budding or established film-maker who is making films about climbing, caving, mountaineering, surfing, BASE jumping, paragliding, bouldering, snowboarding, parkour, skateboarding, mountain biking, windsurfing, SCUBA diving, mine exploration, skiing, hang-gliding, ice-climbing, exploration, fell running, kayaking or any other activity which might fit under the term 'adventure', then we are looking for you!

If you fit the bill, or you know someone who does, and you think your/their film(s) might be suitable for screening at the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival in February 2009, then get in touch with me at briantrevelyan@hotmail.com and let me know about your film.

For ShAFF 2009, I'm working as film programmer, actively seeking new films to screen at the festival, so I'm interested in any films that might be appropriate, be they 5 minute shorts or hour-long professional documentaries.

The main festival programme features compilations of films, usually up to an hour long, but sometimes longer, often loosely grouped into common themes, such as snow sports, climbing or mountain biking. It makes no odds whether the film is made by a professional production company or one girl and a hand-held camera. What matters is that the film is interesting and/or exciting, has visual impact, hopefully says something or presents something in an original manner, and that the production values (visual and audio) are high enough for public screening on a full size cinema screen (we can determine that when you submit the film).

If you think your film fits the criteria, then don't be shy, get in touch and let's see it! If we decide it's not suitable for the main, ticket-selling programme, there is also a fringe programme where such films are shown in satellite venues for free. At ShAFF 2008, these drew audiences often as large as the main events!

In addition to these film programmes, ShAFF will also be screening a wide selection of the best adventure sports videos from YouTube. If you have a clip or film on YouTube, or have found one you think is good enough in quality and content, then please send us the link! Your help is valuable, and every link or suggestion is greatly appreciated.

For anyone who is interested in submitting a film, please note that we can not afford to pay you for the use of your film. However, there are several prize categories for films screened, to be judged at the festival's end, and your film could be a winner. Aside from that, you also get your film screened at a major adventure film festival, which is pretty cool in itself!

Information for submissions can be found at the useful documents page on the ShAFF website.

CLIFFHANGER 2008

2008-04-30T08:43:00.018Z

On 12th and 13th of July 2008, Millhouses Park in Sheffield will play host to the second Cliffhanger Adventure Sports Festival, which will be bigger and better than ever.

The inaugural festival took place in Graves Park last year, during one of the wettest summers on record, and was plagued by torrential rain, turning parts of the site into a quagmire. Nonetheless, over 10,000 people visited the event over the 2 days, and feedback was overwhelmingly positive, visitors recognising the value of the festival, despite the atrocious weather (you may remember Sheffield had a bit of a flooding problem last year).

This year, the site is easier to access from the city centre, by public transport, foot, or bike, and is close to the Climbing Works, the superb state of the art bouldering wall, largest of its kind in the UK, which is owned and managed by Sheffield climbers Sam Whittaker, Graeme Alderson and Percy Bishton. It is also in the heart of the S7 and S8 postal districts, which are the areas of choice for many climbers to live in the city.

Organiser Matt Heason of Heason Events is this year, of course, hoping for better weather, which in mid-July is not an unreasonable expectation! He has arranged for an open-air celebration of all that makes the city of Sheffield a mecca for adventure sports enthusiasts of all kinds.

Sheffield nestles into the flank of the southern end of the Pennine hills, the 'backbone of England', which form the moors, hills and valleys of the Peak District. More than any other city in England, Sheffield has an intimate association with these hills, which extend eastwards into the city itself, forming the 'seven hills' for which it is famous.

Of course, Sheffield has, because of this proximity to the hills, with their plethora of gritstone crags and beautiful scenery, long been a magnet for hillwalkers and subsequently, rock climbers. The famous and pivotal Kinder Trespass, led by the late Benny Rothman in 1932, where ordinary working men and women defied the upper-class landowners, to claim their right of access to the Peak District Moors, included many ramblers from Sheffield and surrounding areas. Without them, we may not have the open access we enjoy now.

It's not all about climbing though! The Peak is nowadays a legendary mountain biking destination, featuring some stunning trails and desperately technical and rocky descents, pulling bikers from all over the UK and even Europe. Whilst they rattle and bounce down the rock steps of the White and Dark Peak, down below their feet, cavers squeeze through the tight fissures underlying the limestone dales, or spin in space in the mighty shaft of Titan, part of the Peak Cavern system near Castleton (seen below). Up above soar paragliders, riding the summer thermals as they launch off the high ridges.

Meanwhile, urban adventurers in the city itself ride skateboards and bmx bikes, at venues like The House, in Neepsend, or the Devonshire Green skatepark, or on the streets themselves, competing at times with the relatively new sport of Parkour, or freerunning, which is catching the imagination of young people all over the UK, practitioners of which can be seen in Hallam Square, in front of Hallam University's main entrance.

Most of these activities are represented at Cliffhanger. The festival is a celebration and promotion of Sheffield's historic and growing heritage, often unrecognised, as a centre for adventure sports. With the growing acknowledgement by the City Council (co-sponsors of Cliffhanger) of this facet of Sheffield's culture, perhaps it may lead to further capitalisation on the attractions of the City for participants in both urban and outdoor adventure. There was even talk of turning the Tinsley Cooling Towers into an extreme adventure centre, with huge bolted climbs up its walls, and bungee jumps from walkways across the tops. Sadly not to be, and perhaps an opportunity missed. But the people who enjoy events like Cliffhanger may influence such decisions in future.

For those who can live without adrenaline bursting through their arteries, the festival is also very much a spectator event, a chance to see some of the UK's finest climbers in action, and to watch demonstrations of less obvious outdoor activities, like bushcraft, or even iron smelting! If you like Ray Mears, then you'll love the bushcraft demos. There is a market, an angling competition, white knuckle fairground rides, a SCUBA pool for you to try diving, and loads more. Above all, it's a grand day out!

To give you a bit of a flavour, here's a youtube video of some of last year's festival:

If watching all the activity makes you want to take part, then join the orienteering ultra-sprint event, a short course direct from and back to, the festival site. After that, (or instead of it), relax with a pint or two from the CAMRA-run beer festival, this year featuring a beer brewed specially for the event by a local brewery!

Hope to see you there!

The Yawning Man

2008-03-18T09:09:00.008Z

I yawned this morning. It was a big yawn, the sort that forces your eyes shut and squeezes out tears, whilst your face contorts like an opera singer on a high note. You can't help it.

And yawns breed yawns, don't they? You yawn, and then you can feel the next one, down in the top of your chest, like a geyser waiting to erupt.

It got me thinking of this film I saw as a kid. Saw it at the pictures with my mam and dad. Tom Thumb, with Russ Tamblyn as Tom. It was a musical. I don't like musicals, with the exception of The Blues Brothers, and maybe The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I kind of like but dislike at the same time.

Tim Curry as Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show which, apart from the makeup, could be me in my 5th form school year photo; same expression, same pose, everything (will scan and post it to compare later)

Anyway, there was this scene, right, in Tom Thumb, where Tom is introduced to The Yawning Man, a claymation figure who comes out of a box to sing the Yawning Man song. The character is voiced by the great Stan Freberg, who voiced many characters in classic Warner Bros cartoons of the '40s and '50s.

The reason I thought of this was the way in which the scene in the film, where the Yawning Man sings his yawning song, had the effect of making everyone in the cinema yawn! You just couldn't help yourself; proof, if needed, that yawns really are infectious, and the old phrase "I caught your yawn" has some basis in truth.

So, here it is. I just watched it and it still makes me yawn. How about you?

Unfortunately, youtube no longer allow embedding for this clip, so here's a dirtect link. I challenge you to watch without yawning!
http://youtu.be/vEJy-xtHfHY

'Klunkerz'; a film about mountain bike history, and ShAFF opening night

2008-02-26T08:52:00.004Z

Well folks (if anyone's reading this), tonight is the official opening night of the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival (ShAFF), at The Showroom Cinema. There'll be an opening ceremony to herald several days of top outdoor action films from around the world (see my last blog entry below).

The festival has actually already started, hosting a series of FREE films at the Cafe Euro on John Street (just off Bramall lane). Last night, me and Jude went to see Klunkerz there, a great film about the bizarre mix of Californian hippies and road-racers who 'invented' mountain biking, and without which we would likely not have the mountain bike as we know it today. A great movie and totally free! Clip below...

There's a film on at Cafe Euro every night this week. The cafe is just a short walk from town, not far past Decathlon, and is worth it. So if you want to be entertained for an hour or two, for the price of a coffee or a beer, go there!
The programme of films is here.

Sheffield Adventure Film Festival 2008 - ShAFF

2008-02-15T12:35:00.022Z

ShAFF - February 29th to March 2nd 2008

Baffin - an Island of Children

NB. all photos are authorised publicity stills from actual films shown at ShAFF; click on image for full size pic.

Above; Aerialist

Above; Committed

Next week sees the opening of what is becoming one of the UK's premier film festivals, the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival, or ShAFF for short. Organised by the ubiquitous and industrious Matt Heason, who also organises the Cliffhanger Festival in August, it is perhaps a little different from the various other 'mountain' film festivals in the UK and around the World.

Seasons

Different? Well, although Sheffield is unarguably one of the cultural meccas of the UK climbing community, due to its proximity to the Peak District's prime rock, coupled to the self-contained climbing 'scene' which has long been a feature of the city, ShAFF reflects not just this specific heritage but also that of other outdoor activities, adventure 'sports' if you will (though I loathe the term 'sport' applied to climbing and the like - sport has rules, these activities are anarchic and self-governing, without formal structures).

Epherme

These other activites include many familiar to Sheffield's climbers: mountain biking, in all its forms (and to the non biker, you'll be surprised how varied it is); skiiing (and we aren't talking ski Sunday here!); skateboarding; BASE jumping (jumping off big cliffs with parachutes); kayaking; surfing; high-lining (tightropes, sort of); kiting; ice-caving and many more.

No Friends on a Powder Day

Cerro Lautarro - Patagonia's Ice Volcano

There's even climbing animation!

Coast to Coast

Climbing itself is represented in all its disciplines: bouldering; traditional rock climbing; soloing (ie. climbing without ropes); ice climbing; big wall rock climbing; mountaineering. These disciplines have evolved over the past 30 years to the point where they are almost separate activities, and some climbers nowadays specialise only in one or two, unlike the past, when climbers would do a bit of all of these, as well as caving when the weather was too wet to climb!

Heterocere

The Tower

Whether you climb, ride, chuck yourself off cliffs or just want a couple of hours of sweaty-palmed excitement, I urge you to go to the ShAFF website, look at the film programme and pick yourself a film in the early part of the festival. Most are on at the Showroom cinema which is, quite literally, a stone's throw from Sheffield train station.

24 solo -XC mountain biking at its most gruelling

Just in case you're thinking that this smacks of macho flexing and testosterone-fuelled willy-waving, enshrined in narcissistic, self-referential films, let me tell you that not only will these films give you an insight into the mindset of the people who do these sort of things (who are, by and large, surprisingly normal), but you'll find that there are a lot of films featuring women, and not a few featuring people who aren't old enough to buy a pint yet.

Contrary to media portrayals of 'adrenaline' or 'extreme' sports, we're not all air-punching frat-boys, straining for the ultimate rush. Most of us find such portrayals laughable and embarrassing. Come to the bar after filming and you can probably meet a good few of the people portrayed in the films.

In-flux

Tickets for each show cost around a fiver, and the reason I urge you to get a ticket for an early show is that I guarantee you'll want to see more! I ought to point out that some of the films are short, and where this is the case, they are grouped together so that no programme is less than about 80-90 minutes, and some are way longer. If you wanna see a few, use the film selection tool at the top of the ShAFF website programme.

Ama Dablam

The Showroom itself also has a large and comfy bar which serves excellent food by daytime, and is a great social venue at al times. Beer choice is restricted to quality continentals (Leffe Blonde and Hoegaarden) or generic keg beers and guinness.

The Showroom, from just outside the train station entrance

Should the Showroom prices or choice not appeal, then the Rutland Arms is one of Sheffield's finest real ale pubs and lies 150m along the road (walk along the road past the giant 'kettles' of the HUBS student's union,

and keep going til you come to the Rutland on the corner). If the weather is nice, it has a superb outdoor beer garden. This is one of the few pubs where you can sink a pint of real ale whilst listening to the Cocteau Twins, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Miles Davis or a variety of 60s ska or 70s punk, jazz, soul or folk.

Close to the Edge

The full programme is available in list format here.

20 Seconds of Joy

Underdeveloped

My name is BrianT. If you see me there, say hi, and you'll find that I'm a very friendly bloke. Hope to see you there. If you need any advice about Sheffield (pubs, food, transport, where is it?), don't hesitate to mail me at btrevelyan@gmail.com, and if you are on facebook, feel free to add me to your collection of friends.

My glamorous partner, Sheffield author Jude Calvert-Toulmin, has also blogged about ShAFF. She was recently interviewed on a local radio station, so the ShAFF entry is beneath the most recent one, about the interview. She will be taking time out from her full-time job as her own PR Manager, to attend many of the screenings at ShAFF.

Jude Calvert-Toulmin

How I got into mountain biking

2007-12-23T17:49:00.000Z

Me and Jude in Glencoe, 2004

I took up climbing whilst I was still at school, introduced to it by teachers and school trips. I'd always been crap at school sports and took every opportunity to skive out of them. maybe as a result of that I always tended towards being a bit of a chubber. Not fat, per se, but a bit padded.

With the discovery that I liked climbing, the first physical activity, apart from masturbation, which I had any real enthusiasm for, I began to change my physical shape, simply by getting out there and climbing. I became lean and fit, enhanced by my taking up running and yoga whilst at University.

I climbed throughout the 80s, but when I got married in 1988, my climbing gradually tailed off, and I saw less and less of my climbing friends. I kidded myself at the time that it was just a result of us drifting apart as we forged the courses of our own lives, but in reality, my (now ex-) wife didn't care for my climbing mates, or perhaps, for the amount of my time and affection which I devoted to them, and which she felt should be all devoted to her.

Whatever the reason, by the start of the 1990s, I was no longer climbing. Not only that, but my running also gradually tailed off, as I failed to set aside time for it amidst my household chores and sundry pieces of life. One day, around 1994, I was suddenly no longer a runner.

The result of the incremental decline in physical activity was that I began to put on weight and to get unfit. By 1998, I weighed 16 stones, compared to the 12 I'd been in 1990.

OK, we all put on a little weight as we age, but I was up to a 36" waist and found it hard to climb a flight of stairs without getting out of breath. I had to do something, so in desperation, I took up running again. I managed several runs of around 5 miles, and began to feel fitter again, though I was still overweight. I split up with my wife that summer, and even got a new, much younger girlfriend, like the classic mid-life crisis man.

The stress of that split caused me to lose my appetite, and weight fell off me (mostly muscle loss I suspect), until I was down to 12st 6lb by August 1998. That month, I spent a week camping in Dufton, in the Vale of Eden, and did some fell-walking and even a fell-run on one day. I was feeling spiritually low, but physically better than I'd been for years, due to the weight loss.

My dalliance with the younger woman fizzled out. There was no heart in it, and I decided to give it a go with my ex-wife again. After a long period of joint counselling from Relate, we got back together. My diet returned to normality and immediately, my weight began to climb again. I reached 14 stones before deciding I had to do something.

I'd tried to pick up running again, but was having problems - persistent shin splints. My GP suggested I was too heavy for running and should try swimming or cycling.

I'd swum in the mid-80s, when I suffered from knee trouble, but found it boring as hell, just plodding back and forth in the pool, even though it got me fitter than I'd ever been before. So I decided to buy a bike. I fancied a bike which I could use out on rough trails in the countryside; a mountain bike.

I'd not had a bike since I was at school, and knew little about them, so I began to pore over mountain bike mags, gleaning advice and information. I set a budget of £300, but ended up spending £500, in July 1999, on a shiny red Specialized Rockhopper, from Ellis Briggs in Shipley. I rode it home to Pudsey, and though it was hard work, I realised this was what I needed. It replaced both running and walking, getting me out into the countryside without damaging my already damaged legs even further, and without taking up an entire day, thus making it easier to fit into my life.

Unlike running or walking, there was an extra dimension, the dimension of speed. A fast downhill brought adrenaline pumping through my brain, and provided the link to my other long-abandoned outdoor love, climbing. It was perfect.

Below: The 1999 Specialized Rockhopper FS

More importantly than the thrills perhaps, it began to get me fit. I started to commute to work in Leeds, detouring along the way to reach the Leeds-Liverpool canal, whose towpath took me into the heart of Leeds. This sinuous route took almost 9 miles, compared to 7 at most on the most direct roads. But it was worth it, and I began to enjoy it more and more, the fitter I got.

Below: me and Horse in Glencoe, 2004

That was 8 years ago. I've since moved to Sheffield, but still commute every day on that same bike, though my commute is only about 3 miles each way now: less distance, but more hills (for those who know Sheffield).

The commuting got me somewhere resembling fit again, but the real joy came when I began to venture out onto the moors and do some 'proper' mountain biking. My skills developed, and although I still can not do a bunny-hop or pull a wheelie, I can ride most of what I come across, wherever I may be.

Through mountain biking, I renewed friendships with people I'd not spoken to in years, and visited parts of the country I'd not seen in over a decade. Most importantly, I found a new facet to a life that had grown stale, and that facet continues to lead me into new territory.

I've never had much money, and lately, things have been extremely tight, financially, due to heavy debts left over both from my and Jude's divorces. As a result, I've kept the same old Rockhopper, replacing parts as they wore out until only the springy steel frame is original, and even that's been bent by occasional crashes. This year, therefore, I determined to buy a new bike, one which would better suit the rocky downhills of the Peak District. One, in other words, with full suspension! I was getting fed up of teeth-jarring, arse-kicking bouncing down steep rocks, and felt the need for more control and more comfort.

There were so many to choose from, I had to do a world of research on each and every one I came across that seemed to fit the bill. I looked at new ones, second hand ones and ex-demo ones, until my head ached. Until, that is...one day... I looked on ebay and there was this bike, made by Canadian bike giants Norco. Only 3 months old, not ridden much, top spec parts throughout, and on offer at almost half what it was costing in the shops!

Catch? There was none. The seller was a reputable guy, good ebay ratings and feedback, a Cytech bike mechanic. I placed my bid and got the bike, all £3,000 worth (if you were to buy it in a shop, that is!). No-one else bid on it. For some reason, the Norco brand hasn't really caught on here, despite good reviews in the press for all their bikes.

It cost a lot of money (for me) but it was worth every penny I'd saved up for it.

This is it. It's a Norco Six SE (the SE stands for Special Edition)...

For the bike-minded amongst you, this is its specification:
Frame: Hydroformed Aluminium
Swingarm: Hydroformed Aluminium
Fork: Fox 36 Talas RC2, 20mm, 100-160mm
Rear Shock: Fox DHX Air 5.0, 7.875 x 2.25" 145 or 165mm
Headset: Chris King
Rear Hub: Mavic Crossmax SX 135mm
Front Hub: Mavic Crossmax SX 20mm
Spokes: Mavic
Rims: Mavic Crossmax SX
Tyres: Bontrager Big Earl Tubeless
Shift Levers: SRAM X-0
Front Derailleur: E-13 DRS, Shimano XTR
Rear Derailleur: SRAM X-0
Cassette: SRAM PG-990, 11-34, 9 speed
Chain: SRAM PC-970
Crankset: TruVativ Stylo OCT, GXP 24/36
Bottom bracket: TruVativ GXP
Seatpost: Titec Scoper telescopic 30.0
Seat: WTB SLT Rocket V, with Titanium Rails
Bar: Synchros Race Gain 35mm Rise
Stem: Synchros Race
Grips: ODI Lock-On's
Brakes: Avid Juicy 7 with 150mm Rotors
Brake Levers: Avid Juicy 7
Pedals: Time ZZ freeride
Colour: Anodised Gold

Yes. GOLD! I am indeed a pimp on wheels. Or would be if a combinatiuon of illnesses, DIY demands, social events and shite weather hadn't kept me off the trails between August and now. In four months I've onlt ridden it in anger ONCE! That's not really on, and is an insult to a great machine. Well, I have 10 days off now, and I'm just about over my cold, so I will get out on it soon. There's a christmas to do, but then....vroom!

Mountain biking doesn't have the spiritual dimension that walking or mountaineering has: you're concentrating too hard on what you're doing, much of the time, to fully commune in any reflective way with your environment. To get that diimension, you need to stop and sit down and watch the sky and let it flood your soul. Then you can capture that same communion. Not all mtbers (as mountain bikers dub themselves) seek a spiritual element, but I do. It's part of why I'm out there.

Check out these images of riders in the Peak District. This is what I'm talking about...

Comet Holmes - Towser's comet

2007-12-12T16:15:00.000Z

Last night, around 11.30 pm, I spent 10 minutes lying flat on my back in the darkness of the frosty back garden, peering through binoculars at the latest comet to grace our skies; Comet Holmes.

It's an unusual comet, in that its tail is pointing away from us, so we see it end-on as a fuzzy circle, rather than the classic comet shape, such as Comet West (below).

Comets have always struck a particular chord with me. Their ghostly, spectral appearance in the sky evokes visions of the cold remoteness of outer space, whence these visitors come from. I remember comets Hyakutake in 1996 and Hale-Bopp in 1997, and the way, night after night, they hung like ethereal phantoms in our night skies, and I can well believe that ancient peoples believed them to be harbingers of doom, or evil spirits (see articles here).

Below: Comet Hyakutake

Below: Comet Hale-Bopp

Comets are still mysterious objects. There are billions of them orbiting our sun, most of them way out beyond Pluto in deep interstellar space, in the Kuiper Belt or the even more remote Oort Cloud. Those that are disturbed from their orbits by whatever means, may veer inwards towards the planets, to become visible to us as their icy surface is heated by the sun, producing the jets of material which make up the characteristic tail.

Some, a few, even occasionally crash into the planets, as Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 did when it hit Jupiter in 1994 (lots of links and info here). The comet was torn into several pieces by Jupiter's immense gravity when it made an initial pass-by the giant planet years previously (below).

Below: Jupiter in 1994, showing the huge scars left by the impacts of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9

Of course, we know more about comets these days. We even crashed the Deep Impact probe into Comet Tempel 1, to see what happened, and analyse the material ejected. We have detailed close-up pictures of the surfaces of Tempel 1 and Wild 2. They look like the Moon.

Below: Comet Tempel 1

Below: Comet Tempel 1 being hit by the Deep Impact probe

I prefer by far the image taken of the nucleus of that most famous of comets, Halley. It's taken from a great distance, and is fuzzy and indistinct, but there's an impression of great size, and immense activity, coupled to a chilling remoteness, which no other picture of comets has ever conveyed. I find it almost terrifying in its ghost-like qualities and hints of unimaginable violence.

Below: the nucleus of Halley's Comet: impossibly remote, supremely terrifying

So what of Comet Holmes? Well, it's been reported on the national news, but has gone largely unnoticed by the public. It looks like a fuzzy patch in the night sky, and only through binoculars or a telescope does its ghostly image make itself clear.

The peak of Comet Holmes' activity, its closest approach to us, more or less coincided with Towser's death. I can't help but think, as I lie there on the cold decking, gazing at that sky-bound phantom, that Towser's spirit has somehow latched onto the comet, and is up there in the darkness, receding from us, from our lives, as the comet carries him away. Because of this, I've called the comet 'Towser's comet' and if I ever see it again, I'll think of him, of his spirit soaring through the universe.

Below: Towser's comet, seen through a telescope

Just a cat: Farewell to Towser

2007-12-05T19:06:00.000Z

He was just a cat, when I first met him. He sniffed round me, unsure of me, then warmed to me when I offered him peekaboo fingers round Jude's gatepost, which he vigorously attacked with his little paws. I noticed then how the tufts of white hair poked out from between his toes, kept immaculately clean by his constant grooming. With his pointy fur 'sideburns', he looked like a cartoon cat, like Sylvester or Tom or Top Cat, but was funnier than all three.

He was just a cat, but never a big cat, or a heavy cat, even at 13. His long soft fur hid the lightness and smallness of his frame. Towards the end though, he felt hollow, like a bird, as his muscles wasted away and the flesh fell from his bones. I picked him up and stroked him, just five days ago, the day he stopped eating, and I felt each rib, and the knobs of his backbone, still hidden beneath his deceptively fluffy coat. The picture of him under his fur was no longer a pretty one. I worried then. I worried that he was going, like Barney back in May, wasting away until his spirit left his body like the last wisp of smoke from a dying candle.

He was just a cat. He was just a cat, but he was much more than that. "Just a cat" is what soulless people say. I have no time for people like that. Say that to me and I'll laugh in your stupid face.

He was just a cat, and he was my friend. He knew me as well as I knew him. We understood each other, each in our own way. We trusted each other. He knew I'd never hurt him. He showed it in so many ways: in waiting for me to come up the road on my bike after work, just so he could roll on the ground and purr and stretch whilst I rubbed his sheepskin tummy; in the way he'd be there sometimes, on the pillow next to my head when I woke on a morning, sleeping softly, or the way he followed me down the garden and sat vigilant on a rock, defying the Big Toms of the neighbourhood to come near, because I was there to scare them off.

He was just a cat and I worried about him, when the vet named his illness, his reason for wasting. When he stopped eating and just lay there, eyes dull, I already missed him. I missed my friend, missed his mincing walk and his feather-duster tail and his constant need to sit on my knee whenever I sat down. Missed the way he used to sit on the table and reach out with his paw when it was feeding time as if to say "just give me the tin, I'll open it". I forgave him all the times he deftly flipped a piece of food off my plate as I ate, and ran off to eat it under the table.

He was just a cat, and I could see him waiting for death to come and I knew he was going, even as I muttered unfelt words of hope. The operation which would save his life was already planned, but he was never going to reach it.

He was just a cat, but yesterday I woke up and he wasn't there, and he wasn't just a cat, he was an empty space, an absence of cat, and a gentle fear in my mind. I looked and looked and found him, lying amidst dead wet leaves in the back garden, under a bench. He was cold, like he'd lain there for hours in the rain and dark. I carried his weightless body in as he purred gently against my chest.

He was just a cat and he's gone now. A last straw was clutched at with a night spent in a vet's cage, fed by a tube. Poor small, soft Towser, in a cage, without his friends, alone, would never see his home again. I can still feel his paw against my lips, waking me just days ago, to tell me it was breakfast time. I can still feel it, warm and soft, with the faint trace of claws. Yes, I can feel that and I always will, even though I'll never feel it again.

He was just a cat, but he was himself, his own being, unlike all other cats. He was Towser, and I wanted him to stay Towser and carry on being just a cat. I wasn't there when the needle went in. I never got to stroke his fur and hear his last purr. I never said goodbye to my friend.

Goodbye Towser my friend. You were just a cat, but I'm just a man.

Below: Jude with Towser as a kitten

Below: a distraught and tearful Jude cradles Towser's body, 5th December 2007

Below: Towser in typical repose

Below: Towsers "sheepskin tummy"

Below: Me relaxing with the cats in our back garden, after a bike ride; summer 2004

Below: Towser sitting on Barney's coffin; April 2007

Below: returning home for the final time

VIRTUAL JUKEBOX FOR JULY, er....DECEMBER. DANCE!! (updated)

2007-12-04T23:39:00.000Z

OK, I have neglected my music fans;

Please note: there is a degree of irony in the title.

Do you all like to PARTY? OK, let's go back to the Manor Hall Disco, Pudsey, in 1977: Catherine Shaw doing a striptease for 50p; some disco dancing extraordinaire, and this; Heatwave - Boogie nights; big tune in 1977, the soundtrack to my summer hols in Perranporth, to teenage snogging at parties, the counterbalance to punk's sneering and spit(e), and above all, a perfect slab of funky pop...

Roxy Music 'Ladytron' - great title and it unfortunately passed me by in 1973, even though it's GENIUS!
My non-existent teenage readers will find it astonishing that in 1973, 11-year olds just weren't musically aware, but that's the way it was. Consequently, I was cheerfully oblivious to most of the amazing music being made at the time, even that which bothered the charts and made daytime radio.
Here is Ladytron, performed in '73 on the Old Grey Whistle Test, the coolest music programme ever...

Right, two tunes don't make a party, do they? SO on to the next piece of music for you to shuffle awkwardly to (so far, apart from Boogie Nights, the 'DANCE' element of the title has been ironic: I challenge anyone to dance to Ladytron).
Way back in 1972, I used to walk to Junior School (on my own!) with this tune ringing in my ears, fresh from the Jimmy Young show.
Widely reviled, sneered at, I have it here as a guilty pleasure, and the warm Northern swell of the brass band, coupled with the blunt, almost flat, vocal style, are guaranteed to warm the cockles of my heart and bring me out in a fever of nostalgic yearning. Oh, and despite what critics may say, it's a gorgeous song of love.
Peter Skellern, with 'You're a Lady'...

Easy listening eh? I love the North, me.

Next up, a contrast. Back in the late 80s, the Son of God, John Peel, went through a phase of playing 'tunes' by death, thrash and doomcore merchants like Extreme Noise Terror (photos), Carcass, Napalm Death, Electro hippies and their ilk.

Below: Electro hippies:

As a lifelong fan of metal (except US hair and pomp metal like Kiss, Van Halen or GnR, collectively known as shite metal or false metal), I thrilled to this new offshoot of the genre, often featuring songs growled or barked out over devastating explosions of guitar, bass and drums, many of them less than 30 seconds long. Timing was critical, to avoid a structured mess of sound becoming just a mess. I ventured to the late lamented Duchess in Leeds (good thread about the Duchess here)to see several of these bands, and very exhilarating they were too.

An offshoot of this metal offshoot was a slowed down version, like the above named bands played at 33 instead of 45rpm. This grindcore was exemplified by dutch masters Gore (whose epic instrumental 'Arena' remains a monolithic statement of the music's visceral power - seek it out if you can!), and by our very own innovators, Bolt Thrower (note the touching Peel tribute on their homepage), whose 1988 LP 'In Battle There is no Law', set the pattern for countless bands to follow.

I now urge you to climb on the sideboard or other suitable item of furniture, and to throw yourself off it into an imaginary crowd of sweating moshers. Repeat until song ends....

Bolt Thrower - Cenotaph

I hope you are now bruised and battered, soaked in sweat, and that your room is totally trashed. Typical Bolt Thrower gig.

Now let's all calm down shall we? Not too much though, because we've already gone all last of the Summer Wine with Peter Skellern, so let's have some still extreme 'easy listening' courtesy of Tokyo's masters of Noise, Merzbow. For those who found Bolt Thrower harsh and tuneless, better skip this next piece (CLUE: Merzbow are described as sounding like "a robot in a woodchipper" - GREAT comment! and "like a cow being castrated" - BULL, surely?)

Nice. Thing is, I really like this stuff, even though it's 'just' noise.

OK, ta ta for now. maybe next time we'll do African, yeah?

Sheffield Documentary Film Festival 2007

2007-11-12T10:38:00.000Z

Well, that was good.

By 'that', I mean to say, the 2007 Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, at which Jude and I have virtually lived for the past 5 days.

In and out of the Showroom, between bar and cinema, Guinness, pints of Stella, Leffe, Hoegaarden, meeting and chatting to strangers, being tired, being thrilled, being excited by superb documentaries of all shapes, colours and sizes.

Jude will be blogging in detail about it, but highlights for me were:

The BUZZ of the whole thing - mainly industry movers, shakers, up-and-comers and wannabees, BBC, C4, SKY and Five, mingling with directors, producers, presenters and a smattering (a mere smidgeon) of the general public;

Jude's infectious enthusiasm for her volunteer work on the festival team, which led to her winning a prize for being one of the best of the 80-strong team;

The FILMS - so many to choose from, so many quickly sold out, forcing unexpectedly astonishing second or third choices to the front;

The people, from pinstriped 'Lee' who lost all interest in talking to me once he discovered I wasn't in the industry, to Phil, the young producer of The Cuban Skateboard Crisis, who ended up talking to me about his film and about the mend-and-make-do skateboard scene in Cuba;

Chatting briefly to Ross Kemp at the bar, and realising he's not as tall as me. Friendly bloke though;

Film highlights I managed to catch included:

To the Limit, a film by Pepe Danquart and Kirsten Hager, about Austrian climbing prodigies, the Huber brothers, Alex and Thomas, set against their audacious attempt to set a new speed climbing record for the 3,600 foot high Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite. Awesome is for once an apt word. The film tells us more about the characters than about the climb, and is all the richer for it. Best climbing film I've seen by far, though whether the linearly-thinking climbing community at large will agree, remains to be seen.

Other great fims were:

The English Surgeon, a documentary by producer/director Geoffrey Smith, about top neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, and his selfless efforts to help save lives in Ukraine, where people die needlessly on a daily basis from entirely operable brain tumours. A moving film which has me on the verge of tears. Coming to a TV near you soon, I expect.

Below: The remarkable Henry Marsh

Echoes of Home, by Stefan Schweitert, about three remarkable and taklented musicians who have taken the age-old Swiss folk tradition of yodelling, which began as a cattle-calling series of whoops (as we are shown), into the 21st century, developing it into a beautiful and unique avant-garde musical genre. For any lover of new and often strange-sounding musics, this film is a must. Seeing Swiss yodeller Christian Zehnder, 'jamming' in a yurt in Mongolia, with Tuvan throat-singers, was truly wonderful, and the embarrassment of Erika Stucky's teenage daughter, who thinks her exuberant and likeable mum (pictured below) "sometimes goes too far", would provide knowing amusement to parents of teenage girls everywhere.

Gerald hauzenberger's Beyond the Forest, a heartwarming, funny and, ultimately, vaguely unsettling portrait of two old people, one of Saxon stock, one descended from the Landlers, who linger on, against their own expectations, in the astonishingly mediaeval environs of rural Transylvania.

All White in Barking, by Marc Isaacs, a study of the benign xenophobia of a handful of white inhabitants of Barking, faced with what they see as an unstoppable wave of immigration. Unintentionally hilarious in places, it also paints an unsettling picture of ignorance and fear which bodes ill for society.

For anyone who loves quality, well thought-out documentaries, the festival is a must. It's easy to dismiss doccos as being second fiddle to drama feature films but a 1 or 2 hour docco can be every bit as rivetting, moving and thought-provoking, if not more, because it depicts a reality rather than a construct.

Whatever, we'll be there again next year.

Mountain bike crashes

2007-09-27T12:39:00.000Z

It's been a long time since I did a blog entry, what with one thing and another. I've been so busy with stuff I just haven't had timme, but now I'm back and I promise to my loyal readership that I will be doing a 'poper' blog entry in the next few days.

My last entry, which was just a few music clips, was commented on as "a load of bollocks". Not sure of the criteria by which bollockhood was achieved, but it's an opinion, of a sort. An opinion which is a load of bollocks of course. All the music on the last entry was top notch, no matter how mainstream.

What whould you rather be attacked by? The werewolf or a polar bear? Werewolf? Yeah, me too. Hairy bad tempered bloke with admittedly pointy teeth, vs 900lb of solid muscle and massive weaponry. No contest.

To look at, the werewolf is scarier. But you could fight it. It's a bloke, for a start. Kick to the nads, good headbutt and you've broken his pointy teeth. Try that with a cuddly polar bear. It'd just open its mouth and bite yer head off.

Anyway, I'm at work now so no time for an in depth article. Intead, I'd like to show you my new bike, or one very like it.

Nice eh? It's a Norco Six SE, 2007 model. I'll tell you more about it in my next entry.

Anyway, as I'm pressed for time, here's an ace YouTube clip featuring some fantastic mountain bike crashes, to give you a taste of what I'll be doing on my new bike!

Like those? Wanna see more?

Nasty? Well yeah, you might be thinking.

But no. That's not a crash. THIS is a crash...

The return of Shirley Bassey

2007-06-26T15:39:00.001Z

Shirley Bassey has probably never been away, but to most people, particularly anyone under 35, she may have seemed like a name from the past, because she hasn't been the star she once was since perhaps the late 70s.

Well all that mght be about to change, since Dame Shirley, aged almost 70 years old, took to a chilly stage at Glastonbury, wearing a spectacular pink dress and feather boa and looking impossibly glamorous.

She proceeded to belt out a selection of her hits of yesteryear, to a surprisingly big crowd, of all ages, who danced in the mud and sang along to the likes of 'Hey Big Spender' and 'The Lady is a Tramp'.

All good fun, and it was great to see la Bassey in good vocal form, but it was pure cabaret (if only she'd played at Lost Vagueness at 2am eh?)

However, little did anybody suspect just what vocal form she was about to unleash. Shirl hasn't been content to rest on her laurels and has engaged some hip young songwiters to provide her with some new material.

The first I knew of it was when an altogether moodier musical beast came rolling from the PA, courtesy of her full orchestra, as she launched into the powerful and defiant opening verse of 'The Living Tree', which I've since learned is to be a single released in the next week or so.

I sat up and took notice, just in time to be blown back into my seat by a searing blast of pure vocal power as Bassey hit the chorus. It made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, which is more than I can say for any of the other performers on the BBC's Glastonbury coverage, Arctic Monkeys included.

Unfortunately, the footage doesn't appear to be available, but I've found the official video and soon-to-be-released single, on the ever dependable YouTube.

Now THIS is singing...

Wow. Number one for sure.

Spooky Woods, Glentress. Mountain bike heaven!

2007-06-14T10:34:00.000Z

Back in 2003, me and Jude went to Glentress, near Peebles, 20 miles or so South of Edinburgh, to meet some mates for some mountain biking fun. Glentress is one of the increasing number of Forestry Commission forests which are being equipped with purpose made mtb trails. We did a brilliant 20 odd mile circuit including some of the best singletrack (narrow track, one bike wide). It included this, the descent through the brilliantly named Spooky Woods, captured wonderfully on helmet cam with some excellent self-composed music to accompany...

Blue tits and woodpeckers

2007-06-08T10:11:00.001Z

Back in March, our next door neighbour, David, gave me a nestbox. Dave is a long-standing member of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), and has an assortment of variously-sized nestboxes scattered about his large garden.

The box he gave me was one he'd made, from bits of an old pallet probably (Dave's a great one for making quality items from recycled timber), and was designed for a Blue Tit. It's all to do with the size of the hole, apparently.

Now, I've been a sort of half-hearted twitcher since childhood. I love most living things, and birds are interesting, amusing, and occasionally, exciting and spectacular, but I'd never had a nestbox, so I was grateful to David's gift. I knew that birds were nesting so I had to get it up quick if I hoped to catch a pair for this year.

Two days later, I was up a ladder, in the large weeping willow which spraeds like a great umbrella over the central part of our back garden. There was a 4" branch stub projecting from one of the main branches which looked perfect. It was on the North side of the tree, which I figured would be best, as it would be out of the heat of the sun.

I screwed the box securely into place, and left it. Within a day, there were birds visiting. First up, a Great Tit, who obviously liked the property, but found the front entrance a bit tight. He was followed by a Blue Tit, who popped inside, back out, then repeated the in-out movement several times, obviously having a good look around. Then he proceeded to start pecking and tugging industriously at the edge of the hole, presumably tidying up the rough sawn margins, until he was satisfied.

Below: Blue Tit

A few days later, I sat quietly in the garden, and was delighted to see a pair of Blue Tits busily flying to and from the box, carrying bits and pieces of material for the nest. We had tenants!
After a week or so, I began to wonder if the birds had deserted the nest, as I couldn't see them, but then one evening I saw the male fly to the box and go inside, carrying something in his beak, so I knew they were still there.

Below: 'Time for your close-up Mr Tit!'

Two weeks ago, I eased myself into the hanging swing-chair suspended from the weeping willow, directly beneath the nestbox. Once I'd been quiet for a minute or so, I realised that I could hear loud cheeping coming from the box. The eggs had hatched!

On Monday, I was scanning the trees out the back with the binoculars, laid on the Mammoth Bed. I noticed a movement in a Goat Willow two gardens along from ours, and focussing in, I could see it was a young fledgling Blue Tit, sitting plumply on a branch, still with bits of fluffy down clinging to its plumage. The adults visited it every minute or two, bringing it food, as it waited patiently. I don't know if it was one of ours or not, or whether they have yet to fledge. If it was then I wonder where the others are. There was obviously more than one in the box. Fingers crossed they all made it.

Below: baby blue tits: aaaah!

As an addendum, I've heard the drumming of woodpeckers a few times in the woods at the back of the house, but never seen one. Whilst I was scanning the trees with the binocs laid on the bed as already described, I looked up and down the trunk of a huge ash at the foot of the garden, which has only just come into leaf. To my delight, a woodpecker flew directly into my field of view, alighting on the sunlit trunk for a second, then flying off again. I had no time to study it, but got a good impression of its size and markings, leaving me in no doubt that it was a Great Spotted Woodpecker. First time I've ever seen one, despite hearing them all my life.

Below: Great Spotted Woodpecker

Next year, I may try and build a box for Long-Tailed Tits, which seem to be common where we live. I'd also love a Tawny Owl box, as these lovely animals call all night in the woods, but are so hard to spot.

Below: Long-tailed Tit

Then there's the Treecreepers, the Wrens, Robins, bats. It's all happening! I had a normally cautious Jay so close I could have touched it, had I dared move, last weekend. Beautiful bird, and bags of intelligence by the way it peered intently at me, as most of the Corvids do.

Below: a Jay

The next bit in the bird saga came last weekend, when we'd been out overnight at a friend's house, after the Peace in the Park festival in Endcliffe Park, Sheffield (see Jude's blog article about it here). Jude was upstairs when I noticed our cat, Towser, peering intently beneath the sofa in our living room. Behind the sofa is a fireplace, boarded over with a sheet of plywood.

As I looked to see what he was after, I heard a distinct scratching, fluttering noise. There was a bird down the chimney! Lucky bird. Of all the chimneys it could have fallen down, it chose one with no gas fire, just a sheet of thin plywood!

I dragged the sofa out of the way, unscrewed the plywood and peered inside. There sat the dirtiest young Starling I've ever seen, covered in sooty dust, but crouched defiantly and gazing up at me with its shiny black eye, as if saying "come on then, if you're 'ard enough!"

I put the board back in place, then closed the curtains, to stop it trying to fly through the window and breaking its neck, then took the board away. Immediately it tried to fly out, and flew to the top of the curtains where a small chink of light shone in. I managed to get hold of it, and carefully prised its claws off the fabric, then took it out the doors at the back. I let it go and it flew a few yards to sit on the fence, where it glared at me, as if it was all my fault, then let out a croaky squawk, before indulging in some serious beak-wiping on top of the fence (classic inter-species bird behaviour indicating displaced aggression, presumably, in this case, at me).

Below: "CROAKY SQUAWK!!"

The croak made me think it might be dehydrated and hungry, so I crumbled up some horrible caramel ryvitas, and put them with a bowl of water on the bird table on the opposite side of the decking. The starling watched me and when I returned inside, flew across, hoovering up the crumbs, before taking several long drinks of water.

I watched it until it flew off, and felt smug for the rest of the day.

Below: "it's all your fault!"

Incidentally, there's a Starling in our neighbourhood who does a great impression of a mobile phone ringtone!

I knew living next to the woods would be good. All I need now is to see the badgers which make so much noise when darkness falls...

Germaine Greer - feminist crumpet

2007-05-19T22:16:00.000Z

Think of a sexy Australian.

?

Hmmm. Nice try, but no, not Cate Blanchett...

?
Oh come ON!

?!

Ah, much better, but I mean a really sexy Australian.

?!!!!
No, not Clive James. Not Dame Edna. Not the bloke from 'Wolf Creek'. Not Delta Goodrem, Rolf Harris, Jason Donovan, Steve Irwin, David Gulpilil, Russell Crowe, Paul Hogan, Angus Young, Mel Gibson, Olivia Newton-John, Peter Garrett, Kimberley Davis, Nicole Kidman or even Skippy.

Can you guess which is which by the way?

I'm talking, of course, about the epicentre of classy Australian eroticism, the inestimably gorgeous Germaine Greer.

Above: "You'd better not be taking the piss, young man!"

When I was young I used to sit up late at night, long after my parents were abed, and watch the offbeat films which BBC2 showed in the small hours. Emotionally involving films, often in foreign languages, sometimes featuring (then unusual) nudity, usually subtitled, such films as 'Belle de Jour' or 'All Quiet on the Western Front', or strange, idiosyncratic hallucinatory things like 'Johnny Got His Gun'. They opened my teenage eyes to a filmic world beyond Hollywood.

Remember, this was in the days when we had just three TV channels broadcasting evenings only and that was it. 24 hour telly was a distant nightmare.

One night, the late slot on BBC2 was occupied, not by the usual dose of strange offbeat foreign dramatic fiction, but by a documentary feature film. I almost went to bed, I remember, but idly half-watched the first 10 minutes or so, which was long enough for me to notice this strong-faced woman with a shock of dark hair and this coolly appraising gaze, which she turned witheringly on her antagonists in a debate on feminism filmed in 1971 by D.A. Pennebaker and Charles Hegedus as the peerless Town Bloody Hall .

The film was fascinating, even to me as an 18 year old, and the verbal sparring between chair Norman Mailer and the woman, Germaine Greer, was the equal of any boxing match.

What really held my attention though was Germaine Greer in her black dress, arms and shoulders bare, as she utterly dominated the stage, completely refusing to back down or be intimidated by Mailer's grizzly bear performance. It wasn't just her manner, which was assured and confident, without ever seeming arch, that captivated me. Nor her hot/cool, half-hooded eyes and knowing half-smile. No, it was her ferociously projecting sexuality, which seeped from the TV like gas, making my head reel. God she was sexy!

Above: bored by Norman Mailer's anti-feminist polemic in 'Town Bloody Hall', sexy feminist icon Germaine Greer dreams about the day that someone will write a blog article extolling her outrageously under-represented virtues as a total babe

Now, I can hear many men, the men who don't read my blog anyway, snorting in derision, and turning away to flick though the non-threatening girls in the laughably titled 'FHM 100 sexiest women'. Well, to me, much as I like a nice safe little kitty cat, I'm in awe at the beauty and power of a tiger, and there is no more tigerish woman walking this earth than Germaine Greer.

Not convinced? OK, let me break you in gently. These next three pics are Germaine snapped by photographer Bryan Wharton in 1969.

Below: Germaine shows a typically Australian open-minded attitude

Below: From the same shoot. NOW are you coming round to my viewpoint?

I hope Bryan Wharton won't mind my including a couple of his shots on my blog. To view the full set, go here.

See? Bet they got your interest. Now you might be wondering "So what did you see in Town Bloody Hall that had you all falling out of your stupid pyjamas late one night in 1980?"

This...

...Germaine laughing openly at Mailer's evident discomfort, showing her unrestrained sense of humour...and her luxuriant mane of wild, dark hair...

...and now Germaine laughing with her antagonist, showing her empathy...and those tanned, bare, sexy shoulders...

...lastly, a volcanically powerful Germaine gives poor beleaguered growly bear Norman Mailer that LOOK which says "I like you, but you're talking bollocks"

I guess what I'm trying to say with those three grainy images is that, when I sat there in my Parent's living room, aged 18, and watched 'Town Bloody Hall' into the small hours, it was Germaine Greer's humour, her warmth, her strength, her humanity, as much as her obvious physical attractiveness, which caught and held my attention. I damned sure hadn't met a woman like her before. Not then, not at that age, in that time.

Up until then I think I'd always tended to focus on the way a girl looked, and I think the same narrowness of focus also clouded my vision when I considered my teachers, or my friend's mothers. It was as if I couldn't see beyond this facade of eyes and skin and breasts and hair and physical womanhood to the fact that there was a human being underneath it all. Of course, I knew that there was, but somehow the physical landscape obscured the person.

Hey...back to the subject! Me!
Now, here on the telly was a woman whose personality was so bloody huge, so powerful that, despite the fact that she was physically, by any standard that might have been set in my hyperactive teenage mind, quite gorgeous, it spilled out and through and round and over the contours of her body, and overwhelmed them. Her looks became almost an accessory to the force of her psyche, and the combination was mesmerising. It was the moment when I realised, perhaps, that no matter how lovely someone may look, the inner, psychological, spiritual essence of that person is at least as important as what you see on their exterior.

But hey, it helps when you look like this...

Or indeed, this...

See, when I see Germaine Greer on Newsnight Review, being argumentative and good-naturedly opinionated, I don't think to mself "She used to be really tasty". Because the things that made her really tasty when I watched 'Town Bloody Hall' as an 18 year old still make her so now, 26 years later. Her face wears its age lightly, and her eyes still shine with the same humour and warmth and lack of pretension that popped locks in my mind in 1980. She always appears to be open-minded and full of laughter, carried along on an undercurrent of sexuality, which she was happy to reveal to a laughably indignant public with her book in praise of the physical beauty of adolescent boys (oh that she'd met me when I fitted the bill!).

So many people believe the hype about her, and see her as some sort of bra-burning anti-male radical, which I don't think she ever was, at any time in her life. Despite her rather disastrous attempt to show her fun side in the horrible Celebrity Big Brother last year, too many people in the UK and elsewhere, still see Germaine Greer as stern, crabby, hard-faced.

Below: "Come here at once!"Germaine tries to look stern, crabby and hard-faced...

I'm sure she has a temper and an intolerance of idiots, and can indeed be stern, crabby and if pushed, perhaps even hard-faced, though I suspect the latter sits ill on her shoulders at those times it's required.

Below: Germaine fights hard to remain hard-faced, but can't keep it up...

Below: Germaine, frustrated at her inability to keep her sense of humour in check whilst trying to be stern, glances wistfully out at the quadrangle...

Below: Gathering her sternest thoughts, she pulls it together, but an unexpected flashback from her acid taking days ruins the effect...

Below: "Oh BUGGER!" Germaine's attempt to look stern, crabby and hard-faced, merely to meet the expectations of an ignorant public, collapse into the laughter which swam in her eyes all along anyway...

I apologise to the uncredited photographers whose pictures I've used, but whose names weren't available on the sites where I found the photos.

The Germaine Greer whom I saw and whom I still see on TV, although I don't know her in any personal sense, and may never meet her, displays qualities which, when seen together, make her, for me, as idealistically beautiful a woman as any Bardot, Loren, Monroe or Minogue.

'100 sexiest women'? Don't make me laugh. I'm not knocking the women referred to one little bit. Sexy they undoubtedly are, or many of them are, at least, BUT the 'sexiness' of the title is just the glittery wrapping on the parcel. Yeah, looks nice, but what's inside?

Below: Exquisite wrapping, but crucially, full of goodies. A radiant Germaine shows her delight at Brian's blog in praise of her multi-dimensional loveliness...

NOTE: If Germaine Greer ever does find her way here and read this: Germaine, the whole thing is tongue in cheek but it's not a piss-take and it's not meant to be offensive or insulting. If nothing else, I hope it made you laugh, or got you mildly aroused. And no, I'm not a stalker, nor do I have a room in my house wallpapered with press clippings and pics of you. Just one wall.

Now That's What I Call Music, Volume 2

2007-04-17T13:16:00.000Z

Welcome to the Virtual Jukebox for April 2007! Some great choons fo ya!

Once upon a time I had a 7" copy of The Beatles 'Paperback Writer'. I swapped it in about 1973, from my childhood mate Ray Quinn, in exchange for Geordie's 'Ain't it Just Like a Woman'. Geordie's lead singer, Brian Johnson, later replaced the sadly deceased Bon Scott as lead shouter with AC/DC.

Much later, many years later, in fact, I swapped another record, I can't remember what it was, even, to another childhood mate, Steven Dibb. It was one he really wanted anyway, and in return, he gave me a bunch of 7" singles of various early 80s vintages. They included 'Puritans' by Happy Family, whose singer, Nick Currie, later became Momus, some obscure German band whose name escapes me, a John Foxx (ex-Ultravox singer, when they were good) double single and a home-made looking American single, from early Seattle punk band The Stiphnoyds. The single lay unplayed for about ten years before I cottoned on to the fact that it is brilliant. Delving onto the net soon turned up the fact that good condition copies are fetching $90 in the US, where it's a highly collectable slice of early US punk.

To kick off this month's virtual jukebox, here it is, for your delectation, the proto-punk classic that is...
The Stiphnoyds - Afraid of the Russians

Below: a rare pic of The Stiphnoyds performing live in 1979

The Stone Roses. What is it about them? They regularly make it into the top ten albums of all time type lists, but, although they did make some great, dreamy pop, I never had them down as being truly GREAT, unlike contemporaries The Happy Mondays. However, singer Ian Brown did make some cracking records after the band were long dead, foremost of which is the dreamlike F.E.A.R., seen below, with its great backwards-cycling video...

Betcha never knew Monkey Boy was a trick cyclist didja?

Do you like Radiohead? I do.
1997, on Jools Holland's 'Later': 'Paranoid Android'...

Oh bugger it! Time for The Captain. Captain Beefheart that is. My hero. With The Magic Band, playing 'Sure 'nuff 'n' yes I do', on the beach at Cannes, in 1968!

And for those of a non musical bent-favouring, here's an interview with the man himself. All good jukeboxes should include some spoken word pieces! Heh heh heh!

You want more? Are Beefheart's trypanosome musical germs bringing you out in a wild fever? The go here and wallow.

Ha! Your brain is now vibrating like the scenery in Roobarb and Custard, I bet. This should cool it down: the mellifluous Brazilian summer night dream that is Vinicius Cantuaria, playing 'Rio' live at Tonic, New York on March 15th, 2003...

And to finish, possibly my favourite track by the magnificent Public image Ltd. From the Old Grey Whistle Test, 1980, this is PiL with 'Poptones'...

If you are an admirer of John Lydon, you might be interested in his website.

And here is my favourite pic of Lydon, looking genuinely happy on a small boat off the Farne Islands. loves his wildlife does John. I could watch ants with him all day.

Oakley doakley. I think that'll do for now. Hope you enjoyed.

For whom The Bells, The Bells toll; a meeting with John Redhead

2007-04-16T10:33:00.002Z

The following article was written for 'On the Edge' magazine in 2002. The then editor, Neil Pearsons, although he liked the article, declared that its subject, multi-media artist and Rasputinesque demi-myth John Redhead, had been "done to death" in the climbing press. It wasn't published.

“I have just returned from the Kendal Film Festival after putting on a show...and it caused quite a riot with 59 complaints and somebody threatening to sue the Brewery Arts centre, DMM and me! I judge the success on the amount of people who feel threatened and walk out shouting obscenities...I must have pushed the scalpel in the right direction...climbers are just so precious...and yet they listened like zombies to John Dunne account for himself as a career climber spueing grades and numbers and ego...! Bernard Newman was outraged......as someone said They suddenly realised that the audience was the art!”
(personal email from John Redhead: 17/11/02)

I met a singular man recently. A man whom some people; those who inhabit the microcosm of the Arts, or the nanocosm of the climbing scene, may have heard of but who is simply another anonymous grain of sand to the average player on the beach.

John Redhead, known for twenty-odd years as a climber and also as an artist (or “image maker”, as he calls himself) lives, for now, in a converted schoolhouse in Nant Peris, Gynnedd, North Wales; an Englishman abroad, in this most fiercely foreign corner of the UK, eating his meals where the sons of Glyndwr once learned their times tables. He lives in this scholastic pile with his partner, Mel(anie), their young son, Ryley and a cat, apparently known only as Cat.

To most people in the climbing world, John Redhead was best known as arguably the finest rock climber of his day. Some of his routes had to wait for up to ten years before a second ascentionist had sufficient madness or bottle (not to mention ability) to repeat them, and were characterised by lethal seriousness combined with cutting-edge technical difficulty. Many have had no third ascent and Margins of the Mind remains unrepeated, eighteen years on (“What does that say about the youth of today?”, says Redhead). However, his primary means of self expression was his painting; big canvases which mattered more to him than his climbing did, and which was a side of him hardly revealed to the often un-artistically minded climbing public.

He was perceived by many, including me, as an intense, potentially unstable madman, screaming at the periphery of the technical, wild-eyed and wild-haired; sexually obsessed and in constant homage to the fecund, menstrually prolific Earth Goddess. Just look at his route names: The Tormented Ejaculation, Cockblock, The Clown (a potent symbol of male weakness), A Wreath of Deadly Nightshade, Womb Bits, Menstrual Gossip, Manic Strain, Sexual Salami. The fact that he called one of them Margins of the Mind perhaps indicated where he was operating from.

He is maybe best known (and most notorious) for the saga of his routes on Great Wall at Cloggy: his painting high on the crag, about which the howls of outrage reverberated from every cliff in the land: his allegedly knocking on Johnny Dawes' door to present him with the “crucial” flake from the Indian Face, of which more later.

Equally legendary and surrounded by such rumour that they are almost mythic in quality are his routes on North Stack at Gogarth: following Fawcett’s example (The Cad), but taking it “out there”, to put up The Bells, The Bells – E7 6b in the days of EB’s – and The Demons of Bosch E7 6b, on which a krab unclipped itself from the peg, bringing about fear-induced hallucinations of leering demons who mocked him as he continued to climb, when a fall would have been the end.

Equally symbolic of the man was his televised solo climb up the tower of Norwich Cathedral, culminating in his having a tantric wank in the bell-tower. I wonder if he shook hands with the Bishop afterwards?

Below: Norwich Cathedral

I (and most of us) can never know what it involves to climb the routes Redhead has put up, much less to experience them as he experienced them, and I would not pretend to know. There were other climbers operating at a similar level but, with the odd exception, one always had the feeling that they approached it from a different perspective to his, and that there were broader and deeper elements of his psyche being expressed through his climbing, which were wholly his. It is these elements, which are not directly to do with the climbing per se, which perhaps are key to seeing him as a whole, and to gleaning a little insight into his attitude to climbing.

Of course, he has outstanding physical ability, coupled with a psychological make-up which allows him to enter these vertical arenas. But he has a close emotional and spiritual bond with the rock and with the places he climbs. It’s this spiritual, holistic approach to the climbs which intrigues me most and sets him somewhat apart from many other climbers. You will never hear him call climbing a sport. Indeed, he decries the very notion of sport. In his book: ‘And One For The Crow’ he writes: “Sport and leisure pastimes neatly fill a painful present with style and artefact. Escape is very often the venture. Generally, I see sport as an anathema.”

Let’s slip back a couple of months: John Redhead, an artist who climbs, or perhaps just ‘artist’ will suffice, comes to Sheffield, delivering his ‘lecture’ at Niall Grimes’ Ape Index show: more of a performance than a talk, I hear later.

Jude Calvert-Toulmin sits in the audience and watches, then approaches Redhead afterwards and tells him he is “in tune with the song of the universe.”

“Are you taking the piss?” he asks, stopped in his tracks. But she isn’t. He realises she means it!

She asks him, straight off, to do an interview, online: to make direct contact with the great unwashed, allowing himself to be examined like a specimen, perhaps cut open, his innards poked with unpleasantly sharp sticks. No edited magazine interview: a live forum where you ask the question YOU want, straight to the unseen face of the rock god, at worst to be told to fuck off and, at best, to glean insight into why this man can do what he does, when you are still sweating up VS’s.

He agrees, of course.

A date was set. Weeks passed. The time duly arrived and Jude travelled to Wales as my passenger, tutting at my preference for loud guitar bands (but letting me play Husker Du anyway) and shifting impatiently in her seat at the slowness of the volvos which haunt the roads to Wales.

We arrived in Llanberis in the rain, having paused briefly in the Pass to glimpse the frowning faces in the rocks, dripping dark water and looking better without their swarming, naked apes, following cracks and aretes and crozzly pockets. Rock always looks good in a storm, bare and proud. But today, one piece of rock didn’t look good. It looked very bad. Across the widest of the Cromlech Boulders was sprayed lurid graffitti. It read: “Tibet Rydd Cymru” (Tibet free Wales - an extension of the Rydd Cymru slogan - that means Free Wales - drawing a comparison between the political oppression handed out by the Chinese government to the people of Tibet and the British government to the people of Wales; thankyou Simon Panton for that!).

Not being able to read Welsh, we looked at the crude sprawling letters with dismay. Just boulders, I reminded myself, but the sky went on weeping and a part of me wept with it. It just looked wrong. The fact that, translated, it’s bollocks, makes it all the more pointless. I hate vandalism, particularly when it’s mindless.

We got back in the car and slid down the empty pass.

Llanberis was still as grey and drab as I remembered. Parking up, we hunted for food. It was late, and only the Spar was open. We entered and some heads turned slightly as our voices filled the quiet. A woman talking at the counter with the cashier switched from English to Welsh. As we disappeared down the aisles, she went back into English, only to revert to Welsh once we approached the checkout, then silence as we stood next to her, to be served unsmilingly by the woman taking our money. Still the same as ever then.

What should we expect, I wondered, as we headed back up to Nant Peris? Who is John Redhead, really? This figure from before climbing became a marketable lifestyle. My mind fills with the mythic image: loner, madman, wild caveman hair and beard, cranking up crazy rock with no runners and no practice. Realistically, I knew of the legend, but nothing of the man, only some of what he’d done, so it was with interest that I strolled across the road, slightly behind Jude, towards a slim man of maybe what, Forty-five? Fifty? (never was good at ages).

He stands at his gate, grim house rearing behind, the lacerated flanks of Elidir fawr behind that. He looks tall; maybe 6 feet. Hair pulled back in a ponytail, not wild – no caveman this. For a moment I’m reminded of the bloke from the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s godawful album “Rumours”. He’s smiling with his mouth, and with his eyes, which are piercing, glittering, intense but not fierce.

He shakes hands with me and kisses Jude’s cheek. I like him immediately. He seems honest and intelligent and full of good humour; totally unlike what I expected. We indicate our readiness for camping on the site next door but he will have none of it. He’s made up a spare room for us. Somehow, I thought he might.

His house was once the school-house here. It’s big, hall-like. Jude pauses before the outer doorway. She says she senses a strong aura; a shimmering in the air around the door. John laughs but agrees. He feels it too: it’s always there he says. I see nothing and say nothing. Instead I shiver and my skin prickles slightly in the chill air. I don’t believe in ghosts. Redhead evidently does though.

We enter. Inside, the main room of the house is a high-roofed hall, smelling of spice and incense, filled with dark cleft wood and a gallery of sculpture and paintings alongside pieces of driftwood, stones, bones and, incongruously, a pair of garden shed sized speakers which sit, latent with threat of aural pulverisation, at one end of the room.

John’s son, Ryley, quickly sizes me up and auditions me into his band. I spend the next hour or so tapping drums and a tambourine somewhat arrhythmically as I take turns chatting to John, who joins in the drum workshop as he talks, slapping and kicking the heavy chest he sits on.

He answers questions about the house, its past and its ghosts. He talks of his experience here; of Wales, Welshness, his place amongst it, the resentments and rationality, or otherwise, of nationalism, stimulated onto this topic by Jude’s mention of the graffiti on the Cromlech boulders. The current of local resentment towards the English runs surprisingly deep in some people it seems, and the conversation hints at tragic, almost balkanesque prejudices in some quarters. No wonder the cliffs were frowning in the rain.

Ryley Redhead holds no shyness. He has commandeered me now. Exhausting my limited musical talents, I am taken out of the conversational mechanism and given a guided tour of his room. He lapses into that way that children have of seeming old, intense in a grown up, wise way, demonstrating his somersaulting cut-out macaw with a seriousness befitting a nuclear physicist showing his cold-fusion technique.

Tour over, we return to the Big Room to have a fight with paper dogs. I muse on this as I play. I’ve seen no electronica in Ryley’s play-world. Just paper dogs, fingermouse-style. Paper dogs and a child’s imagination.

The fight lasts almost an hour, neither dog winning, just two children; one young, one old, playing and laughing and making dog-voices, forgetting everything else.

Don’t grow up Ryley, I think to myself. This is too much fun. Don’t be pushed unwittingly down time’s measured mile into sober, sensible adulthood. Never stop being a child! I look round at John and realise that my fears are probably unfounded.

We eventually begin to tire. After a glass of whisky, Jude and I retreat to John’s work room, where a sofa converts into a bed (with black sheets), in which we fall asleep, watched by whatever real spirits live here in this place.

Sudden awakening brings that disorientation that comes with waking in a strange place – someone else’s house looking back impassively at your sleepy face. Jude stirs and wakes. We make love to entertain (and add to) the spirits cavorting in the place. Sorry about the sheets John. Maybe not black ones next time eh?

Dressing, we descend the spiral staircase, straight out of Jules Verne’s Nautilus, to the kitchen, all high school windows, herbs and corners in the diffuse morning light. Clutter and life abound, though the room is still and silent, suspended activity waiting to be resumed.

John reappears, still cheery. Cheeky even. A wicked glint in his eye hints that he’d let us know if he didn’t like us, and that we almost certainly wouldn’t still be here were that the case.

We wander into the cool of the damp garden and talk about the quarries and the rock and the life of the mountains.

John decries the eroding effect of the hill farms and their sheep, and advocates a phasing out of that poorest of industries and a return to their natural state of these abused hills, which at this moment seem to be listening to him, so great is the quiet around us, peaks dreaming in opaque mist. In his book, Redhead describes a conversation with a farmer, below Clogwyn Du’r Arddu:

““The sheep should be on lowland farms…the sheep are killing the mountain…look, no trees…desolate and barren…your product is creating a desert…”. Dafydd [the farmer] had heard it all before and was unrepentant.

“The sheep are not to blame for the lack of trees, because they had already gone before the sheep were introduced. The trees were felled for use in fighting the English…for building and for fuel…” "

I voice a degree of sympathy with the struggling hill farmers, but I concede that in the long run they are probably doomed and that the hills would be better left wild, to clothe themselves in scrub once more.

Jude longs to visit the fabled Pete’s Eats. John laughs and says ok, indulging her wishes with a friendly, almost paternal warmth, so we get into my car and go to Llanberis. John tells us that many of the younger climbers eschew the muggy air and fried breakfasts of Pete’s now, and opt instead for the sterility and easy modernity of “Electric Mountain”, where they presumably drink frothy coffee and munch paninis, instead of pints of tea and chip butties. Tut! No sense of their climbing heritage, these girls and boys!

Pete’s is the same in feel, but seems larger and maybe cleaner, than I remember it from my last visit in the eighties. The steamy frying smells are still there though, and the mix of climbers, cyclists, walkers and other tourist species is pretty much unaltered. Jude is thrilled to be here, in this mecca, with one of its high priests as company and guide.

We order large breakfasts and sit by the window and chat. We are joined by two of John’s mates: Martin Crook, an impish, capering, sharp-witted jester as foil to John’s humorous but piratical free spirit. They obviously love each other and have that easy relationship that long and intimate friendship brings.

Martin makes us laugh; he’s a natural comic. The other is Tony Loxton, best known as a photographer of climbers and their environs. His presence creates a triumvirate of friends which excludes Jude and me slightly, though not deliberately, and we turn to each other for conversation as the three talk shop.

I feel at home. It was always one of the attractions of Pete’s. It is a kind of home, to any climber. It’s almost spiritual; the sense of belonging in here. The Church of the Chip Butty! How could one of our persuasion go anywhere else in town? Why would you want to? Only Bernie’s at Ingleton (caver’s answer to Pete’s) comes close. Maybe Eric’s at Tremadog too.

Large breakfasts stashed in stretched stomachs, we leave, heading for the gloomy defile of The Pass and stopping, almost within its dripping jaws, back in Nant Peris. Time to go to work. The interview is why we are here, ostensibly, lest we forget.

In the bedroom, which still reeks with the spice of sex, sits John’s computer. He logs on. Jude takes over the hot seat and goes to the Rockfax site, opening up the Rocktalk forum, where a silent chatter of expectant voices awaits us. We are late. Questions are being asked by people who want Mr Redhead to be there to answer them in person.

The star of the show reclines on the stained bed, as Jude’s fingers dance on the keys, giving first an apology for lateness to the unseen watchers, then offering to deal with some pre-asked questions first.

I sit by and wink at John, who winks back, as Jude fires questions at him and his face clouds and darkens in thought, then clears and smiles, like the sky on a windy spring day of racing cumulus and hard sunshine, as answers take shape in his head.

He ponders, briefly, over each question, sometimes rattling off instant answers and, at other times, referring to sheaves of typed notes or extracts from his book “And One for the Crow” before answering.

He seems to be having fun, wearing a more or less constant grin. At one point, I feel that he is enjoying colliding head-on with the questioner, addressing them “Hey, fucker!”, when they query the alleged misogyny of his route names, and visibly relishing their imagined reaction to his belligerence.

Some people on the forum accuse John of being obtuse and deliberately vague and incomprehensible. He is genuinely upset and bemused by this; puzzled as to why his replies are confusing to people. I can see why: his language, English though it is, is used in such a way that it seems full of ambiguity and implication, expressing things indirectly, rather than cutting straight to the point in the clear fashion most of the complainants seem to want. I can see how some people could be baffled.

Personally, I like his use of English; the way he speaks is rich and verging on the poetic at times. Others on the forum seem to agree, and arguments begin to break out in cyberspace, between those who understand, those who don’t and those who feel John is a pseud, a bullshitter who won’t give a straight answer. This isn’t confined to the interview: in Dali’s Hole, up in the quarries, Paul Williams named a route “John Verybiglongwords”, suggesting his language has long been a source of head-scratching.

The interview has started sprouting branches, developing a life of its own. It’s off the life-support.

Too many people try to pin John down as “A Climber”. He tries to point out that he isn’t really that: he’s an artist who climbs, and he uses the climbs as a part of his art, extension of and inspiration for. Not interested in grade arguments or favourite route or rock. He becomes very animated though, over the Indian Face saga, hinting at unhealed wounds but an uneasy respect between himself and the other John(ny). He tells of the loss of the flake, of how it was loosened by the peg hammered behind (not by him), and came off in his hands. It apparently stands in the bathroom of his old house now.

John allows his respect to show for the ascent of the Indian Face but says he’d have done it differently; that he never practiced moves on a route, or even trained specifically for it. He then digresses to talk about his approach to these hardest of his climbs-no training, no top rope practice, little or no cleaning and no warm-up beforehand, which in today’s calculated training environment is virtually heretical.

He’d simply climb, on-sight whenever possible, sometimes convincing himself he’d die there, but accepting it and being surprised, almost, when he didn’t. Only way to do it, he says, is to accept that you are going to die.

He talks of doing The Bells, The Bells in non-sticky EB’s (early rock boots, distinctive navy blue and cream - numb and lacking friction, by today’s standards) : how he climbed it within sight of his partner and their child yet believed he would die before them, broken on his beloved rocks.

Such is the inner strength of the man; that he could not only face that conflict within himself, but could subdue its capacity to breed fear and then go ahead and walk into those jaws of death under the gaze of his loved ones.

I sit and listen, appalled and awed.

“Today, darling, I shall die. Watch me do it.”
He didn’t die, of course, hence the interview.

Historical note: in 1987, Mountain (issue 116) reported the aforementioned Indian Face flake incident thus:-

“Now to a bit of controversy; Redhead is trying a new line up the Great Wall, a sort of super-direct Indian Face, coming into the small crux-overlap on that route from the left. While inspecting the line of his intended route in that area, he checks the Indian Face Rurp in the side of this overlap. Lo and behold, the peg comes out in his hand, but worse is to follow, the overlap is loose. Dave Towse abseils down and together the two climbers gently lift the overlap from the face, without reservation, and carry it down to Llanberis to prove that no undue force had been exercised, “It just came off in my hand, chief,” said Redhead,- and that would appear to be what happened! The flake seems to have been attached by three small areas to the mother rock but its removal has scarred the Altar of British Climbing…it also makes Indian Face just that bit harder…”
(for Dawes' oown version of events, see link at bottom of page)

People online are asking if he still climbs. He replies that he likes to boulder, and that he does so utterly selfishly, for his own ends.

He is asked what his favourite HVS is. “What’s that?” he answers. “I’ve never climbed a HVS!” He is grinning hawkishly. The impish arrogance! I’m sure he has climbed a HVS. He just likes to confound.

The interview is long. It starts at about half past eleven and goes on until nearly four o’clock. He seems to have enjoyed it but the audience is polarised. This bothers him. He considers himself transparent, or so he says. Perhaps he is, but if so, he’s transparent like old-fashioned distorting glass: not everyone gets a clear view of the man.

Jude loves the online disharmony: “Nothing like a good argument!” she says, viewing the sneering and the head-scratching and the Redhead defenders, onscreen.

She winds up the session, and John promises to answer more of the questions later, posting the answers in a day or two. He actually does so, too, showing the honesty underlying his wicked clowning.

He asks how we thought it went, appearing genuinely anxious to have performed well. He needn’t worry. It was a memorable one.

We had planned to leave and head back to Leeds. John asks us to stay another night. The ghosts nod in assent. We readily agree. He explains that the Heights Bar in town has opened a new bistro extension and tonight is its opening party. There will be free food! He invites us as his guests.

Jude’s eyes flash with fire at the thought of meeting new people; of being in luvvie mode with people who may even have heard of her. She likes to be recognised! I silently think that she’s forgotten whose guest she is!

It seems that John has enjoyed his pressing of the virtual flesh. He is enervated, sparkling. He shows us round his workshop/studio; the former school hall, all bare boards and hard light. Two wrist-thick ropes hang from a joist, about three feet apart; perhaps to climb on, or maybe just for fun. I imagine Ryley swinging on them, alongside his dad, both leering insanely and filling the hall with laughter.

Mel’s sculptures lie around: twisted metal, once part of a car body, now almost organic, non-planar. They resemble pieces of an auto-wreck. I expect to see bloodstains. I realise they are, in fact, seats of a kind, beaten so as to accommodate the lines of human form, as if a jumper from a high building had hit the roof of a vehicle, leaving their shape in the steel.

In a corner of the studio is a display stand - a fan of leaflets advertises John’s work and copies of the dust jacket from his last book “and one for the crow” are stapled to the backboard. I ask him about it. He tells me that he had originally sent the manuscript to Ken Wilson, for publication. Wilson deemed it “too diverse and multi-media” and refused to publish it as it stood, so John advertised the book on subscription and got money up front from people who bought it before it was printed: ”thereby giving me full control over content and design.”

Unfortunately, the subscription money didn’t cover the full cost of publication. At around this time, however, Redhead was “bludgeoned on the head by a madman with a crowbar” at the back of his house in Bangor, and fortuitously received a payout from the criminal injuries compensation award scheme. The attacker was charged with ‘intent to kill'! As John himself says: “The money I received was exactly the shortfall for the book. An amazing coincidence! But not one that surprised me...I saw the injury as Karmic payment for putting words on paper (I am an image maker). I often wonder what the next payment will be for the next book...perhaps that is why I keep spending all the money from the subscriptions!”

John also recalls that certain major retailers refused to stock the book, once it was published, judging it too controversial, so it remained available by subscription only.

He is visibly bristling, his eyes gleaming like volcanic glass, as he recounts all this, his ebullience now coloured by indignation. He is evidently and obviously angered by the idea that anyone should attempt to alter his work, to remove its sharp edges. His attitude seems to be “if they don’t like it, fuck ‘em!”.

I ask if there are any copies of the book left. A few, comes his reply. May I buy one? He ponders, hesitant: “You can have one for twenty five quid.” He says. “That’s less than the normal price. I think it was thirty eight in the shop.” Always one for a bargain, I relieve Jude of a pony and John sorts through the few books he has left, looking for a nice clean copy. I ask him to sign it. He thinks carefully, eyes misting, so I go sit in the kitchen, John following with the book, still silent, in thought. He bends over it and his pen waggles. He closes the book and hands it to me. I don’t read what he’s written. Anticipating, I decide to savour the not knowing and read it later.

I examine the book’s cover. The dust jacket is smooth, with a dull black sheen, like water-worn basalt. In the centre, a figure, which I presume to be Redhead, squats on a rock, wearing a grotesque mask and a monumental papier mache cock, managing to appear simultaneously comic and sinister, menacing, even diabolical, like the mummers in undiluted English folk celebrations. Comic yet frightening. John Redhead.

He tells me of his next book 'Soft Explosive, Hard Embrace', which is again held up by lack of funds to get it printed. It has grown from just a book into a multimedia venture, incorporating a CD of sampled sounds, turned into a sort of music of the quarries, which John has spent a lot of time composing; wandering the great grey holes and recording the voices which now replace the human ones which shouted and shrieked and chattered in past ages, now only a sussuration of ghost-echo in dim caverns. He has collected sounds of wind in tunnels, tinkling spoil, disturbed and sliding, the booming, clanging of rusty steel plate and the clatter of chain links.

He plays the CD, composed by he and Philip Beauvoir (AKA 'Spongebrain'). It is haunting, the sounds bridging the natural and the industrial. It is essential listening for anybody who entertains a wish to really experience the quarries as anything other than a climbing playground. The eerie, ghost-thronged ambience of the swallowing grey pits reverberates in oppressive waves from the huge speakers, raising echoes in unfamiliar, little-visited corridors of my brain.

It is impressive and moving. My whole mood has shifted simply by this exposure to it. The yawning gulfs reach out to me through the sounds, and I am there, flying in the roaring air and tumbling amongst the violently born rubble.

Jude walks in from the garden. John turns the music off and the dark magic stops distorting the room. Things return to normal, but the ghosts which are trapped in those sounds continue to pass through me, silently. I’m almost glad to be leaving as we pile into my car again, and head off down towards Llanberis and The Heights. It’s party time.

We reach the bar. As we enter, I notice a large crowd of youths eyeing us from across the road. They don’t look friendly. My mind strays to thoughts of nationalistic prejudice, the graffiti, but I dismiss it and enter the pub.

Inside, a spanking new conservatory structure has been tacked onto the building. This is part and parcel of its new bistro. An adjunct to the pub; a pleasant place to eat, well-lit and airy. It is the focus of this; its opening night.

The place is already filling up. JR is absent. He has gone up to some friends house with Mel and will be here later. Jude and I find a table and sit, peering about. A few acquaintances wander in, surprisingly and much to our delight.

There is a commotion at the door. Apparently the local youths are trying to get in. The doors are locked. We inform the landlord that John has yet to arrive. He says he will have to phone to be let in but, as we discuss this, John suddenly appears, with Mel, and sits at our table, having got in anyway, by some dark art.

One of our acquaintances, Gruff, has a friend with him, Chris Doyle. He starts to talk to John. Chris is young, and a good climber. He tries to engage John in conversation, asking about his climbs, but John seems to verbally toy with him, taking a seemingly belligerent, almost pugnacious stance in reply to Chris’s innocent questions, to his discomfort. I begin to see another side to John here. Not cruel, exactly, but a John who perhaps enjoys having harmless fun at the expense of others, echoing some of his replies in the interview.

Chris is embarrassed and maybe a bit self-conscious, but persists with his questions. John is taking the piss: not in a malicious way but in a mischievous way. At any rate, Chris gets nowhere and gives up trying.

No harm done? A hero debunked perhaps? A star fallen in someone’s eyes; god become man. That was perhaps the intention of this awkward lesson. An unwanted education has been delivered.

John later tells me he is uncomfortable in group conversations, especially with people he doesn’t know, and this can lead to him being a little blunt, but he refutes the notion that he may wish to deliberately offend anyone.

The bar is packed. We talk to Martin Crook again, and to Ray Wood, a youthful Howard Marks lookalike who seems to know everyone and be everywhere, to judge by the profligacy of his photos in magazines and books. Both these two are clowns; sharp and funny, bouncing off one another.

A third character joins us. I try and catch his name, as he’s very quietly spoken. “Dangerous Phil” quips Redhead. Is that his name? I wonder, racking my brains for Phils who might fit his description, by now not wanting to appear rude by asking his name again.

“Phil” has a strange air about him, and speaks slowly and gently. His eyes are soft and honest, pale blue in a pink face under a shock of almost white hair. I’d guess an age between thirty five and forty, but could be younger.

He carries wounds, scars from a huge ground fall a while back. He almost died, but is calm about it and has no hesitation in discussing it. He acts, he says, as John’s lawyer. John is looking at me, grinning. Are they pulling my leg? Apparently not. Phil is a lawyer; the Samoan attorney to Redhead’s manic Dr Gonzo. Fear and Loathing in Llanberis.

I drink my drink, getting drunk. I chat and laugh with Jude. John is off again, talking to trees in the forest of bodies which fills the room.

It’s now late, and John says its time to go, though the bar shows no sign of closing. He gives us and Phil a lift back to his place in his semi-fragmentary Transit Van, leaving my car in Llanberis. I sit in the creaking cab of the van, trying to remember if I’d removed the England flag from the car window. Ah well. If not, I’m sure someone will remove it for me.

Back at the house, there’s no sitting up late. We’re drunk enough already. Phil is almost paralytic, as Mel tenderly makes up a bed for him in the studio where he, scarcely comprehending where he is, settles down into a stupor (at some point in the night, he disappears from the house. No one seems worried, so I guess this is not unusual).

Myself and Jude fall asleep almost immediately; the sleep of the drunken man. The ghosts cannot penetrate the fog that envelops us tonight.

Next morning it isn’t raining. We go out and sit in the garden and look up at the still cloud-swallowed hills. Jude hates it. Hates the oppressive, crowding bulk of the mountains, so close to the house. Hates the wet and the cold.

I am bemused; I like it here. Like all those things she hates. And anyway, it isn’t cold.

John tells us he intends to move to Barcelona sometime soon. Jude’s ears prick up: this is more like it! She loves the light and warmth of Spain. She says we must visit him when he is there. He says we’d be welcome.

It’s time to go. We pack our things and haul them out to the van. John gives us a lift to Llanberis and drops us by Pete’s Eats. He hugs us both in turn and urges us to stay in touch. We promise we will. Jude’s good at that-a natural communicator. I’m not, but I will try.

The hero leaves the scene. We go into Pete’s and order two breakfasts. We savour the only bit of the town which seems truly friendly.

Bellies full and fingers greasy, we stroll along to the Heights. It’s the day of the World Cup Final, and we aren’t going to miss it. Even Jude, avowed footyphobic as she is, has caught a dose of world cup fever. We smirk as Brazil defeat Germany, laughing at the Old Enemy’s tears of defeat. The irony of this in light of my musings on Welsh nationalism is not lost on me.

All that remains is the journey home. Emerging from the bar, we amble back towards Pete’s, where my car is still parked, intact. A group of local teenagers (probably the same we’d seen the previous evening) stop their spitting and swearing at the other side of the street to eye us, without any trace of warmth, respect or humanity. Just cold, dull, stupid stares.

About fifty yards down the road, something flies past us, thrown with some force, and skitters dully along the pavement. Half-eaten mars bar as missile: hardly lethal, but not nice. It missed.

I turn and look back at the youths, who pretend it wasn’t them. I want to walk across and hit one of them, or call them inbred sheepshaggers, but feel it wouldn’t help matters and anyway, wouldn’t that be racist? Are the Welsh a race? We walk on. A cry of “GYPSIES!” comes from the ugly mouth of one of the youths, directed at us. I look at Jude, and she looks back at me: “I suppose we do look sort of like gypsies!” I say. We burst out laughing, which probably annoys the cross-eyed, gurning fools up the street, who want to annoy and anger us, and provoke us to abuse and anti-welshness, the more to justify their own surly aggression. Sorry boys. You had me going for a moment, but I’m not that easy.

As we stroll back to the car, I ponder on John Redhead, and on what I’ve learned about him; the insight into his character, gleaned from our too brief meeting. He turned out to be a friendly, open-minded man, but with a wicked streak of mischief running through him. A man who suffers not fools gladly, and seeks every opportunity to make fun of those he considers deserving of it. He talked of his climbing almost as an aside, but still with obvious pride and glee, yet seems to regard it in a different way from most other “ordinary” climbers. For that reason, I think that to understand Redhead is difficult for many in the climbing world. Most of us climb for different reasons to his. He sees climbing through different eyes. In trying to even approach some degree of comprehension of where he’s coming from, I think, not to my hardest (snigger!) climbs, or to some trial of mental or physical strength or endurance, but to a stormy day in early September, when frantic clouds were torn by a hissing wind and showers marched like sky-high phantoms across the cowed landscape.

On that day, sudden impulse drove me to seek out the lichenous, tree-shadowed, much abused gritstone pinnacle of Adel Crag, where I levered myself from the damp, leaf-strewn ground and bouldered mechanically for an hour, becoming dispirited and fearful, performing badly, at odds with the rock. I dropped to the ground and rested, thoughts fading away.

As I sat in the deserted woods, mind empty, I suddenly felt the rush of all my senses being assailed at once. The air smelt of oxygen and rot, the trees hissed and roared and tugged at the earth, the ground heaving around their roots. The scene flickered like a slow strobe, as clouds flocked across the sky, playing now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t with the departing sun.

The rock pinnacle squatted in the twilit woods and seemed alive, as if it could move from this place should it so wish.

Somehow, I had slipped into the landscape, where before I had awkwardly imposed myself upon it. That elusive and invisible opening through which I had unconsciously sought to insert myself into the scene had appeared under me and sucked me in, like a watcher in a gallery suddenly finding himself inside a painting.

I got up and climbed. And this time I was just a spiritual passenger in my own body, travelling with no fear, as the rock itself guided my limbs up, across, around its contours, its ancient spirit welcoming me and controlling my physical self, or so it seemed, allowing my mind to laugh and wander, and to exult in what the rock was showing me.

As darkness fell, I stood once more upon the ground, just touching the rough, green-skinned grit. At that moment, I belonged there as much as did the oaks or the ferns or the slugs and centipedes, and I loved, truly LOVED, this forgotten outcrop. But more, I felt that the love was returned. It is an insight I am sure Redhead would understand and which, perhaps, parallels and informs some of his own mind-processes when he stretches himself on those hard canvases. Redhead the climber is merely a detail within the vast canvas of Redhead the image maker, Redhead the man, and that should not be forgotten.

The car sits where I’d left it, outside Pete’s Eats. Before I get in, I open the boot and take out the copy of “and one for the crow”. I open it and look at the flyleaf.

It reads: ‘For Brian-“the eggs are hatching!” Enjoy. John’

I hope he’s right.

__________________________________________________________________

For Johnny Dawes' version of the Indian Face saga:-

Not necessarily about the Indian Face, by Johnny Dawes

To read an online 'live' interview with John Redhead, conducted by the users of UKClimbing.com, go to this site. The interviews can be found by scrolling down in the boxin the centre.

White Horses

2007-03-27T16:21:00.000Z

There are those of you to whom this will mean something, and there are those of you to whom it won't.

Just click the link.

WHITE HORSES

Sigh....

Well folks. If you liked that, and you're sitting there all misty-eyed, then this is for you too. No visuals but listen to the music...

Playing YouTube clips

2007-03-19T12:50:00.000Z

NOTE: To view the clips without annoying 'sticking', click on them to start the download, then hit the pause button at bottom left of the clip, and wait until the clip is fully loaded (ie. the red line has moved fully from left to right, below the video image). Then hit play, and it should run smoothly.

Now that's what I call music, Volume 1

2007-03-05T23:07:00.001Z

Listen to Frank Zappa, The Prodigy, The Velvet Underground, Big Joe Turner, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Laurie Anderson and many more, in my virtual jukebox!

Below, you will find a selection of excellent music, hand-picked with loving care by me from YouTube. Pretty much the only thing they have in common is that I love them all.

I'll choose a selection every month from now on, so do come back and see what other gems I've unearthed in April.

In the meantime,if you hate Kraftwerk, or think Hank Williams is shit, don't despair. There is a massive variety of stuff here, and all of it is stuff you won't see or hear very often. If you don't like any of it, well, Volume 2 will be along in a month or so.

First up, one which usually divides people into love/hate camps. It's Canadian multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, with her surprise 1981 UK number 1, 'O Superman'.

Although the repeated "oh oh oh oh oh..." may get on your nerves initially, give it a chance; it becomes positively hypnotic after a minute or two. I've never researched what Laurie meant to say in this piece, but listening to the words leads me to believe that it's about the moment of detonation of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truncated "oh oh oh oh oh..." represents the reaction of the victims, perhaps the start of a word or sentence, or just an exclamation at the white light that ended the exclaimer's life, cut off and frozen in time forever by the annihilation of the bomb. The words speak of mundanities, messages left on answering machines, everyday lives brought to a sudden halt. The words "Here come the planes. Are they American planes?" are filled with menace once you place them in context. Chilling.

There. That wasn't too bad was it? I hope you perhaps viewed it in a different light, bearing in mind what I said about it. I find it beautiful, sinister and terrifying.

Now, surely, comes a piece of music that everyone loves. A truly groundbreaking piece of teutonic sound engineering from 1974 (!), recorded using no digital technology whatsoever, remember. Such things were the sole province of Star Trek. This, animated later, in 1979, by a very young Roger Mainwood, is Kraftwerk, with 'Autobahn'...

Good eh? After Laurie's spine tingling, unnerving calmness, and the Vorsprung Durch Technik of Kraftwerk, are you suitably relaxed, or perhaps poised in glacially aloof elegance? Well sod that! It's time to liven things up!

Here, to raise the roof, is Big Maybelle Smith, from the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, with the hollerin' 'I ain't mad at you'...

Gotcha dancin' eh? Big Maybelle sure knew how to party. Rock and roll? Bah! In 1958, the black folks been doin' it for years.

Speakin' of rock and roll, remember chubby kiss-curled Bill Haley and his watered down version of 'Shake, Rattle and Roll'? They had to change the lyrics to disguise the fact that it was full of metaphors for sex and sexual anatomy, metaphors too salty and redolent for the sensitive ears of white folks. Big Joe Turner had no such qualms however. You think Kraftwerk were cool? Nah. Big Joe and his buddies were cool. Just check out their suits man! Anyway, here he is in 1955, live at the Apollo...

BIG JOE TURNER ladies and gentlemen! Yeah! How about that band!

So, what was the white folks doin' back then when the black folks was bein' so damn cool and inventin' rock and roll for the white folks to steal? Well they was makin' a whole heapa shit, but shinin' amidst that shit was some real diamonds, some of which the white folks who had some damn taste would go on to breed with the black folks music, to make Elvis. There was this one guy, who could sing about waitin' for a train, or bein' lonesome, and break your heart. Hank Williams, come on down!

The man was a genius. That was at the Grand Old Opry, in 1952. He sang like a lone coyote howling in the cold desert night and was a million miles removed from some of what passes as 'country' these days. It sounds almost alien by todays over-produced standards, but listen to the phrasing and the rhythm and you can hear the rock and roll just like you can with Big Maybelle and Joe Turner.

OK, let's come back up to date, or at least to December 1996. In 2004 I saw Orbital's final show, at Glastonbury. Awesome was, for once, an apt word to use to describe the experience. Here they are, appearing on 'Later', with the pulsating 'Satan'...

I don't know where the strange dialogue at the intro to that track comes from originally, but I do know that The Butthole Surfers used it well before Orbital, as the intro to the song 'Sweat loaf' on the superb album 'Locust Abortion Technician' in 1987.

OK, now that Orbital have got us into a mood, let's continue with The Prodigy, from the 1994 album 'Music for the Jilted Generation'. Watch out for the ever-nuts Keith Flint sporting long hair. Doesn't make him any less scary. This is 'Poison'...

The Prodigy videos are always guaranteed to give you bad dreams.

Speaking of bad dreams, this next selection, whilst it represents Frank Zappa at his peak, also features one of the best videos of all time. The clip is recorded from the Old Grey Whistle Test, sometime in the late 70s. I have no idea who did the animation but it is mind-bending.. The track is 'City of Tiny Lights' from Zappa's 1979 album 'Sheik Yerbouti'...

I read a comment on YouTube under this video which read "Wow, that was some weird trip, and I'm sober!" Quite.

So whilst we're all spiralling through our Zappa-induced weird trip, let's up the ante, with one of the 80s great underground bands, Spacemen 3, playing live, somewhere, some time. The track is 'Suicide'. Unfortunately it's split into two separate YouTube clips (well, it is 22 minutes long!), but it captures something of the intensity of the band's live performances...

That was part 1. if you dug that, click below for the rest of the song. Apparently there's a live DVD around, from which this is taken. Enjoy...

I saw Spacemen 3 at a place called Adam and Eve's in leeds, which became The Central, and is presumably now something else; a downstairs bar/club off the pedestrianised street opposite The Duncan pub near the Corn Exchange, behind what was X Clothes, but is now, probably, not. They were pretty intense. Immediately after the gig, I went across town to The Warehouse, which is still, as far as I know, The Warehouse, to arrive in time to see The Happy Mondays. Shaun had long hair and his dad was dancing at the side of the stage, and the audience was mainly lads in footy shirts. They were a brilliant, bellowing, beery, blokeish riot and a far removal from the wraparound-sunglassed po-faced hallucinatory intensity of Spacemen 3, despite the chemical overlap.

From Spacemen3 to a much earlier psychedelia now. No idea where this 1969 clip is, but it's sunny, and Owsley's finest was probably surging through everyone's cortical capillaries in a dazzling rush. All the better for listening to Quicksilver Messenger Service and their sheet-lighting guitars, as they scorch the earth and the mind with 'Mona'...

Good eh? Quicksilver Messenger Service are one of the oft-overlooked jewels in the crown of West Coast psychedelia, and well worth checking out if you like Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead or Moby Grape. Speaking of which...

That was, apparently, from The Mike Douglas Show, 1968. I was six!

Still in that era, let's have some Velvet Underground shall we? Not one of the wired classics but the gentle and dreamy 1967 comedown of 'Sunday Morning'...

Mmmmm...dreamy....let's continue dreaming with Chico Hamilton. This is from the same 1958 newport Jazz festival that the Big Maybelle clip came from. The tune is 'Blue Sands'. Nice title. Beautiful music...

I'm away now, looking down on the world from the point of view of a teddy on a cloud. I don't want to break the mood so this next tune fits in well. Factory Records weren't all about harsh and bleak urban soundscapes. They also had the soft, spiralling glitter of The Durutti Column, the obvious soundtrack to J.G.Ballard's hallucinatory visions in 'The Crystal World'. This is (I think) 'Never Known' from 1996's 'Lc'...

OK folks, time to get a bit menacing, moody and sinister, building up to the conflagrative finale I have for you! In 1988, Nick Cave released the album 'Tender Prey'. On it was a song written from the point of view of a man going to the Electric Chair. It was called 'The Mercy Seat', and here is Nick, without most of the band, giving a superb delivery of the terrifying lyrics, which are printed below, so you can sing along...

It began when they come took me from my home
And put me in Dead Row,
Of which I am nearly wholly innocent, you know.
And I'll say it again
I..am..not..afraid..to..die.
I began to warm and chill
To objects and their fields,
A ragged cup, a twisted mop
The face of Jesus in my soup
Those sinister dinner meals
The meal trolley's wicked wheels
A hooked bone rising from my food
All things either good or ungood.
And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this measuring of truth.
An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I'm not afraid to die.
Interpret signs and catalogue
A blackened tooth, a scarlet fog.
The walls are bad. Black. Bottom kind.
They are sick breath at my hind
They are sick breath at my hind
They are sick breath at my hind
They are sick breath gathering at my hind
I hear stories from the chamber
How Christ was born into a manger
And like some ragged stranger
Died upon the cross
And might I say it seems so fitting in its way
He was a carpenter by trade
Or at least that's what I'm told
Like my good hand I
tatooed E.V.I.L. across it's brother's fist
That filthy five! They did nothing to challenge or resist.
In Heaven His throne is made of gold
The ark of his Testament is stowed
A throne from which I'm told
All history does unfold.
Down here it's made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.
Into the mercy seat I climb
My head is shaved, my head is wired
And like a moth that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life
Just to hide in death awhile
And anyway I never lied.
My kill-hand is called E.V.I.L.
Wears a wedding band that's G.O.O.D.
`Tis a long-suffering shackle
Collaring all that rebel blood.
And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this measuring of truth.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I'm not afraid to die.
And the mercy seat is burning
And I think my head is glowing
And in a way I'm hoping
To be done with all this weighing up of truth.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And I've got nothing left to lose
And I'm not afraid to die.
And the mercy seat is glowing
And I think my head is smoking
And in a way I'm hoping
To be done with all this looks of disbelief.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway there was no proof
Nor a motive why.
And the mercy seat is smoking
And I think my head is melting
And in a way I'm helping
To be done with all this twisted of the truth.
A lie for a lie
And a truth for a truth
And I've got nothing left to lose
And I'm not afraid to die.
And the mercy seat is melting
And I think my blood is boiling
And in a way I'm spoiling
All the fun with all this truth and consequence.
An eye for an eye
And a truth for a truth
And anyway I told the truth
And I'm not afraid to die.
And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this measuring of proof.
A life for a life
And a truth for a truth
And anyway there was no proof
But I'm not afraid to tell a lie.
And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this measuring of truth.
An eye for an eye
And a truth for a truth
And anyway I told the truth
But I'm afraid I told a lie.

And now folks, it's time to wind it all up with the ultimate party tune. Another that's so long it has to be YouTubed in two parts. Some of you may find this hard going, but persevere beyond the blast of noise at the start. This is the unclassifiable genius Diamanda Galas, whose work I've long admired and whom I'd love to see perform live, but she performs only rarely in the UK. Anyway, here is Diamanda Galas, with 'The Litanies of Satan', parts 1 and 2...

That's all for this month. Vol 2 will be posted in April. Hope you found something to enjoy here. Bye-bye, pop-pickers!

Lunar eclipse

2007-03-04T15:38:00.000Z

Last night (Saturday) was clear and beautiful. I wandered outside onto the decking in the back garden around 10.30pm to watch the silvery Moon slowly vanish into Earth's shadow, and take on a copper-red colour, as the Sun's light refracted through the Earth's dusty atmosphere. Fantastic.

Looking on the net for a nice pic, I found this superb composite series of images, taken by an unidentified photographer, which clearly and beautifully show the way the Moon's colour changed through the eclipse. Thanks, whoever you are....

The Epic

2007-03-04T15:03:00.000Z

I went climbing on Friday. First time I've been on the rock for about a year! I did far more mountain biking and even walking last year than climbing, but this year I'm determined to do more climbing. After all, it's something I've been doing for 28 years and I don't want to become an ex-climber. I get far too much from it for that to happen.
I had a day off work, intending to use the good weather to trim back the big weeping willow in the garden. My mate John 'Simmo' Simpson rang, to arrange a mountain bike ride for Saturday, and on hearing I had the day off, suggested I come climbing with him and his mate Alex. Hmmm...climbing in the early spring sunshine, on God's own rock at Stanage, or climbing a tree to saw dead branches? Contest? I think not.
So a sunny but chilly afternoon saw the three of us stretching our collective rusty joints and muscles on the 'soaring crackline' of Robin Hood's Right-Hand Buttress Direct (HS4a), Inverted V (VS4b), Twin Chimneys Buttress (VS4c) and Heather Wall (VS4c).
Bloody hell it was good to be climbing again after such a long lay-off! I was a bit creaky and my confidence isn't all it should be, so VS is about as much as I felt up to, but I'm determined now to try and get on the crag more regularly. Maybe I'll finally get round to screwing my plastic holds to the outside of the house to finish my traversing wall, and maybe I'll even replace my 20 year old Scarpa Cragratz with some more modern footwear (probably just get 'em resoled again though).

Below: looking up the groove of Inverted V to the exposed finishing moves (Photo by James Parratt, from the UKClimbing.com photo database. Climber: James)

Below: Heather Wall (Photo by Lizard, from UKClimbing.com database. Climber: Amanda James)

Incidentally, we went out on the mountain bikes yesterday, setting off from Castleton for a circuit more or less around Mam Tor, taking in much of Rushup Edge and the hairy descent down the Chapel Gate track. It was a great little circuit, even though I had a bit of a skidding nightmare on the technical descent to Greenlands from the Mam Nick bus stop. The mud was so sticky it just clogged my tyres up and I lost any grip. The slightest touch on the front brake or change of direction simply sent the bike sideways. How Simmo managed to stay on I don't know. It didn't help that my Time cleats are so worn that my left foot comes unclipped at every bump. Not good when you're flying down a rocky obstacle course at speed. Must replace them, although the shoes are falling apart as it is. Maybe time to look on ebay and see if I can find some cheap replacements.

Hmmm...I haven't got any recent pics of me climbing. The best I have are these:

Below: Me on Lancet Crack, VS5a, Brimham, in 2004 (Photo by Simon Jacques)...

Me on Great Western, Almscliff, in 2003...

I had a minor epic on Great Western, which puts me in mind of this poem which I wrote, about having an epic on a hard climb...

The epic

This is easy, even fun.
Climbing up past cracks,
their protection eschewed in misplaced confidence.
Moving smoothly, strongly upwards,
unknowingly striving towards a desert
of fear and unexpected exhaustion
(you'll know it when you get there)
Movement falters then stops
with a sudden stab of regret
at those ignored cracks.
Cast adrift in a sea of rising panic,
as veins bulge like wire,
and arms begin to sing their fading song.
The grey stone sighs and hums,
looking the other way,
offering nothing to help.
No relief, no purchase, another loser, NEXT!
Shaking and sweating,
panicked grimace versus cold face
staring impassively, eyeless,
at, through and beyond,
indifferent to the drama of the personal
and the frailty of the organic.
Death whispers in the distant ground,
the final spotter, reliable to the end,
transmitting a silent siren call
up the rope’s increasingly dead weight.
The imaginary creep of rubber on rock,
the start of sweat from face and finger,
breed sheer fear.
Legs burn and scream.
Arms fossilise, cement-like.
Looking up in desperation,
as hunter becomes hunted,
with all tables turned.
Now it’s fight or a free flight
to your final destination.
Here come your final moments,
seconds from the end of all things.
Fingers whiten in their grip on disappearing life,
as the other hand is whitened,
catching in the bag,
then reaching up.
Iron calves are bellowing
like old machines made to turn.
A hand of pink bananas, all thick skin and mush
finds sanctuary in the everted cathedral,
A salty echo of the sea
falls from a sniveling nose
through an eternity of empty air
to explode against another dimension.
Soon to be followed by a redder splash?
The white knuckles ride
on the Ultimate, Oblivion, Nemesis!
But sanctuary is squared!
Feet now skitter and scrape in a bad dance.
Engines misfire and cough,
sucking the dregs of fuel.
Death laughs now and opens his arms.
The rubber and rock find a new embrace.
Ridiculous banana finger parodies
make the cold face crack a thin smile.
The joke is shared!
Holding on, looking down,
fumbling for aeons with heavy jewellery.
Looking for the right bling to keep that grin.
Offering accepted, the dead weight of purple cord,
still touching death’s disappointed sulk down below,
adds years of life with just one automatic action.
One clip.
The Cumbrian Rope Trick.
One clip brings
life,
sun,
wind,
sound,
a universe
which seconds ago wasn’t there.
The beckoning ground is now above,
just out of sight,
almost within reach.

That was originally posted by me on the multi-faceted forum community at Fex Wezner's Art Forum. You can be sure to find a forum on there to suit you.

The cruelty of whaling in the 19th century

2007-02-26T10:13:00.000Z

Above: a 19th century whaler

I spoke in my last article about the proud history of the old, hand-harpoon days of whaling, and even the romance which surrounds it, certainly when compared with the brutally efficient murder of the modern counterpart, which gives the whale virtually no chance of escape.

The 19th century whalers, in the heyday of the industry, hunted using hand-thrown harpoons and lances, and whales, even when harpooned, would often escape, or turn on their attackers, smashing men and boats to pieces.

I don't want to glorify the early whaling industry, as it was the start of the indiscriminate slaughter which decimated the populations of these wild creatures. Although I have some admiration for the men, who were undeniably brave, I still regard it as a brutal slaughter, though one which, back then, at least brought the man into intimate contact with his living quarry, and which furnished a product to industry for which there was no equal substitute at the time.

I can understand that there was a genuine demand for the products of whaling. It was an industry which serviced a real need, as opposed to today's artificially subsidised factory process. Once the harpoon-cannon was introduced however, the whales were doomed, and the rate of killing outstripped the need for the products.

Ultimately, artificial whale-oil substitutes became available, and there was no need for the slaughter to continue. But continue it did, in a way reminiscent of the unrestrained slaughter of the American Bison, stopping only when the dwindling whale stocks threatened the existence of the industry itself.

It was as if the existence of the industry was reason in itself to carry on whaling. Very much as the farming industry is supported now, despite massive over-production, when it should really be left to market forces, and its scale adjust accordingly, with some farms returning to scrub, marsh and woodland, and the workforce redeployed in other industries. I can't agree with keeping an industry on life support, especially one which is so barbaric and uncompassionate.

The old-time whalers were, i suspect, capable of far more feeling and compassion for the animals they hunted. That's not to say they had any sentimentality about it, but when you have to look someone in the eye and use a piece of cold steel to kill them, you are inevitably going to feel differently to a man behind a big cannon, tens of metres from his victim, physically, and a million miles spiritually and emotionally.

My heart aches when I think of the age of some of the huge animals which perished, stuck through with whaler's lances, choking on their own blood, vainly trying to draw breath with punctured lungs. The whales may at least have had a chance of getting away, but their death was as slow and painful as any since.

To get an idea of the mentality of the old whalers, and the means by which they hunted and killed the whales, I urge you to read this, from Herman Melville's magnificent 'Moby Dick'. A breathtaking piece of writing. Remember that Melville served on a whaler, and this is the reality of the kill, drawn from Melville's first hand experience. The description of this particular hunt is relentless, cruel, exciting, and ultimately, heartbreaking:

(note: I've edited the chapter slightly to remove elements not directly concerned with the pursuit and kill)

"There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger, they were going all abreast with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea.

Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble.

"Who's got some paregoric?" said Stubb, "he has the stomach-ache, I'm afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must be, he's lost his tiller."

As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.

"Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that wounded arm," cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.

"Mind he don't sling thee with it," cried Starbuck. "Give way, or the German will have him."
With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for the time.

It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.

Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the last chance would for ever escape.

But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang to their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapours of foam and white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped the German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels.

"Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as he shot by; "ye'll be picked up presently--all right--I saw some sharks astern--St. Bernard's dogs, you know--relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah!--Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain--makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way; and there's danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he's going to Davy Jones--all a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!"

But the monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at last--owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue--the gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this "holding on," as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the enormous surface of him--in a full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet--the pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.

As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock.

Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!

In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!

"Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it into the sea.
"Haul in! Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."

The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship's lengths of the hunters.

His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was untouched.

As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.

"A nice spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."

"Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"

But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground--so the last long dying spout of the whale.

Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately, by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom.

It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was discovered.

What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink. However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such was the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.

"Hold on, hold on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body, "don't be in such a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains."

"Knife? Aye, aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank."

That poor old bull, blind and unable to swim properly, run down and slaughtered, only to be released, to sink as so much shark-meat, to the bottom, a wasted death. Melville includes the description of the stone spear point dug from the whale, to illustrate its great age, and the tragedy of his death is deliberately evoked.

Melville felt for the whale, I'm sure. His compassion bleeds from that heartbreaking line:
"It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright."
That whole section makes for uncomfortable reading: it's like an old blind lame man being hunted down mercilessly, and slaughtered.

Of course, the whale, as a species, gets its own back, in the form of the almost supernatural Moby Dick, an old, white-humped bull who, despite his age, and the assorted ironmongery which is embedded in his ancient hide, is the polar antithesis of the weak, blind, wretched victim of the pursuit and murder described heretofore.

Though this is fiction, the same must have occurred many times, Wise old whales of a century's age or more, wise and with poor eyesight, like any elderly human, shepherded by their loving family, treated like so much meat. It's not just the age of the animal, or the fact that its wild, free life was ended, but the agonising slowness, the torture of that death.

The following links all lead to sites featuring whaling, largely taking an anti-whaling stance. Please visit them for a look at their argument. If you want the other side, the pro-whaling side, it's easy enough to find.

I make no pretence of balance. I'm resolutely anti-whaling and always have been.

Greenpeace

Sea Shepherd

A brief history of whaling

Sympathy for the Sea Devil

2007-02-23T20:15:00.000Z

SYMPATHY FOR THE SEA DEVIL

As a postscript to the last blog entry, I'd like to comment briefly on the 10m long Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) that was caught off Antarctica by a New Zealand trawler this week. Although the trawler was long-lining for Toothfish, and not out to catch the squid, i can't help feeling sad for the squid. Cephalopods, like whales, are intelligent creatures, relatively speaking, and a squid this size must have reached a ripe old age, so I feel total sympathy that it should suddenly find itself hooked and gaffed and dragged on board a fishing boat, although the scientific importance is significant.

Ah well, it's just the one. There was a Giant Squid (Architeuthis dux) that got hooked similarly last year by a Japanese boat, and was filmed thrashing frantically to escape. It only broke free by severing its own tentacle. There was also one, a female, which was hauled thrashing from the sea back in 2003. There's a low quality video clip of it here.

In many ways, these huge animals are like the whales; maginificent, rare, long-lived and slow-breeding. It's just as well they taste of ammonia, or I'm sure we'd be fishing for them too, and let's face it, other than people like me, who amongst the general public would sympathise with them?

No need for whaling

2007-02-23T20:10:00.000Z

There has been a renewed interest in whaling recently, what with the recent IWC vote on lifting the ban on commercial whaling, and the ramming of a Japanese whaling ship, the Kaiko Maru, by a ship belonging to the marine conservation action group Sea Shepherd, making all the TV news programmes. Whether the ramming was deliberate, or not, is open to debate, as are the rights and wrongs of it. Everyone has their own views. Personally, anything which is done to necessitate a whaling vessel returning to port, as long as lives are not jeopardised, can only be a good thing. So if the ramming was deliberate, then I'd cautiously support it as direct action against what I view as a barbaric and unjustifiable industry.

Thing is, Sea Shepherd seem to be prepared to use some tactics which could cause serious harm to the people on the receiving end, such as hurling Butyric acid onto the decks of the whaling ships. I'm not sure if this is propaganda designed to discredit Sea Shepherd but, much as I decry whaling, particularly in its loathsome modern incarnation, I can not support chemical warfare against men who, whatever we may think of their industry, are, at the end of the day, just trying to earn money to support their families. Butyric acid is nasty stuff, and not merely "rancid butter" like SS claim on their website.

Assuming the acid-throwing assertion is true, Sea Shepherd may say that anyone prepared to fire an explosive harpoon into the body of a peaceful, fairly intelligent wild animal, to kill it brutally and painfully to provide meat for an almost non-existent market (let's not even discuss the risible "scientific research" pretence), deserves all they get. Well, that might be their viewpoint, but actions like throwing strong acids at people are, in my view, unjustified. Moreover, carrying out such actions risks losing a lot of the support they almost certainly have amongst the public of many nations. Killing or maiming people doesn't win supporters to your cause.

As to whaling, well it would be easy to call me a hypocrite, seeing as I support (by my eating habits) the rearing and systematic killing of animals for food. Is a whale different to a cow, or a pig, or a chicken? Well, the latter are all domesticated animals, bred down from wild ancestors, to serve as food animals. I sympathise with any animal which is killed to become food for another animal, but I see no difference between a stoat killing a rabbit, a lion an antelope, or a human a cow. Some animals have evolved to eat other animals. Humans, pigs, bears, rats, foxes and many other species are omnivores. We've evolved to be able to make use of pretty much anything edible, and as a result, other animal species are a naturally intrinsic component of our diet.

I won't digress here into the rights or wrongs of farming animals for meat. I'll state my opinions at the end of this blog.

So, what about whales? Why shouldn't we hunt them? Because they're intelligent? So are pigs, probably not far away on the scale from even the brighter whale species. So are octopus, but we'll happily stew them in wine. Fear and pain aren't functions of intelligence. Witness a mouse suffering death by a thousand bites at the hands of a cat. Not a particularly intelligent animal, but its pain and stress and suffering are manifest. Intelligence alone is not a sufficient criterion.

Beacuse they're so beautiful, huge, mysterious? Please. Looks are nothing. All life is pretty much equal in my eyes, but Giant Squid should count themselves lucky they're so terrifyingly hideous to most people's eyes (and taste like ammonia).

No, the reason whaling should be stopped is that, simply, there's no need.

Whales of all species were decimated by the introduction of intensive factory whaling fleets. Most large whale species are still, to this day, rare animals, compared with their numbers even a century ago. The claims that Minke and Fin whales are now at sustainable levels has yet to be verified, and their numbers are still way, way, below the populations of the 19th century.

But suppose the Japanese, and the Icelanders, and the Norweigians, and the suddenly numerous other nations clamouring for the whaling moratorium to be lifted, get their way. What then? Will these slow breeding giants be able to maintain their populations at present levels, with even modest hunting? I doubt it. And who's to say, when the whalers are out in the open ocean, that they might not 'mistakenly' harpoon a Humpback, or a Blue, or a Right? Once flensed, nobody would know. The log would say another Minke. Do they do DNA analysis on all catches? I don't know.

The fact is that, in general, we don't need to hunt and kill wild animals for our food. Particularly not rare, elusive animals such as these. OK, we hunt Red Deer in the UK. Yes, we do that. But we do it because we long ago killed off their natural predators, the wolves, so we have to, in effect, take the place of the wolf, or else the exploding deer populations will strip the highlands of their vegetation, forests will die back, the ecosystem which the deer form a part of, will slide off balance, or more so than it already is. We hunt rabbits, a species described as non-native, but which has been present in our country for centuries, so might as well be native. But they are not industries. They are haphazard, ad hoc, small scale hunts, and the prey are profligate, they are everywhere, to the point of being a nuisance. It's as much a cull as a hunt.

There are something like 16 billion humans on this planet. All these hairless apes simply can't live off other wild species, and we don't allow cannibalism, so what do we do? We farm. If we hunted for our meat, there'd be nothing left. In those areas of the Earth where 'bushmeat' is still a significant part of the local diet, such is the reduced nature of the habitat for the wild animals being hunted, and so efficient are the weapons and traps used by the hunters, that species are being decimated to the point of disappearance. It's not sustainable.

The oceans are no different to any other major habitat. If we start to hunt the larger (meatier), slower breeding animals which live there, we will, inevitably, drive them to the point of extinction. Look at the way stocks of common food fish have been expoited almost to the point of commercial non-viability. Cod, Herring, Haddock, Tuna. These are species which numbered in millions and which were, not so long since, viewed as pretty much inexhaustible. Yet we've managed to remove them in such numbers that they are, in some areas, almost absent. Do we want the same to happen to whales? It would happen a lot faster than with fish.

Perhaps the Japanese feel that the whales are there to be exploited, as are all other species, on land or in the sea. If they all get caught, to the point of extinction, that's unfortunate, but hey ho, a whale left swimming is a resource left unused. That's a cultural viewpoint which is rarely echoed by the Western mind, but in my opinion it's a lazy and arrogant way to think and it needs to change. Japan is advanced enough to ditch such barbarous arrogance, just as we've ditched bear-baiting, bull-baiting and hunting with hounds.

Let us also not forget that currently, most of the meat from the whales caught ends up in pet food. Some is sold for human consumption but public tastes have changed, even in Japan, and whale meat is no longer popular even there. It's a dead industry being kept alive as a matter of principle and a misguided sense of tradition. We whale because we can, not because we must or should.

The suddenly plentiful and eager African coastal nations who are demanding the right to take up whaling, no doubt see it as a way of making money, and many of them are poor places indeed. But suppose they wanted to kill their elephants, or their rhinos, gorillas or lions? Is the poverty of the nation a reason to look the other way and say "Oh, go on then..."

Below: a modern harpoon cannon, loaded with an explosive tipped harpoon, on South Georgia

There is NO NEED for anyone to hunt these wild, rare animals for food. The whaling industry is about political and cultural posturing, not about feeding hungry mouths. Sorry Japan, if whaling is integral to your culture, then fuck your culture. You need to change.

Even if whales were as common as rabbits, I'd still be opposed to it, if only because of the brutal method of killing. When a harpoon explodes inside a whale, understandably often rendering it semi- or un- conscious, there is no easy way of determining whether it's actually dead or not, and, seemingly, it often isn't.

More to the point, if the kill is not clean, then there's no way to dispatch the mortally wounded animal, given both its size, and the fact that it is rolling about in often freezing cold, heaving seas. It is left to die slowly, over minutes or even as long as half an hour, or occasionally, it has been suggested, hauled onto the factory ship, stunned and weak but still living, to be cut up as it lies, immobile and mute, on the steel deck. The whaling boats are meant to re-harpoon the whale if the first one fails to kill it, or to use a high-velocity rifle to administer a coup de grace, but for reasons given, this is often messy and ineffective.

Below: an explosive harpoon detonates inside the body of a Minke whale

Below: a mortally wounded Sperm whale spouts blood from its blowhole

Below: a dead(?) whale is hauled on board a whaling ship

Whaling is an ancient industry, with proud traditions, fascinating history and even romance surrounding it. But the whaling of today bears little resemblance to that of the 19th century, when men were lowered into the sea in small boats to throw hand-harpoons at the surfacing whales. It was probably no less agonising for the whale - death by the sword as opposed to death by the bomb, but at least the whales had a chance. The whole thing is now so one-sided, the whale is doomed as soon as it's sighted.

The following links all lead to sites featuring whaling, largely taking an anti-whaling stance. Please visit them for a look at their argument. If you want the other side, the pro-whaling side, it's easy enough to find. I make no pretence of balance. I'm resolutely anti-whaling and always have been.

Greenpeace

Sea Shepherd

A brief history of whaling

Below: a summary of my opinions on farming, killing and eating animals

OK, we can choose not to eat meat, but it's natural that we do. So I'm not opposed to eating meat, and thereby, killing animals to provide that meat. What I do expect, and hope for, is that the animals I ultimately eat have a good quality of life, up to the point of slaughter, and that the slaughter is carried out as quickly and with as little suffering and pain as possible. Given that a pack of wolves will often tuck into a still struggling caribou, not bothering with the coup de grace before filling their bellies, the majority of the UKs food animals perhaps have a relatively easy death, if the correct slaughter procedures are adhered to. I do concur that, for the period immediately leading up to slaughter, and the seconds of the slaughter itself, however, the animal is both stressed and frightened. I know, I've seen it first hand in an abbatoir near Leeds.

Below: Chickens hung up to have their throats cut - probably the least humane non-religious slaughter method in the UK

Below: a frightened bullock restrained for stunning, prior to slaughter

Below: a stunned sheep has its throat cut in an abbatoir

We're so far removed from plants evolutionarily speaking, that we scarcely even consider them as living things, but as all organised multicellular organisms do, they struggle and fight for survival when threatened, and 'suffer' in their own way when killed, boiled or swallowed alive into the acids of our stomach. Bottom line: unless we can photosynthesise, or metabolise inorganic chemicals, we rely on the killing and eating of other living organisms to sustain our own lives. Every meal involves the sacrifice of a life.

Given the necessity to kill, I regard it as far preferable that animals are reared humanely, and killed in a strictly controlled manner, as quickly as possible, and that we do not plunder the limited populations of wild animals the planet harbours. You may disagree, I don't really care. I arrived at this position over many years, including 13 as a vegetarian.

List Of Contents

2007-02-19T10:32:00.001Z

BrianT

Fried Egg - a true story (some names changed to protect the guilty)

The rotting corpse of Psalter Lane

What time is it...?

Best of Kendal Mountain Film Festival Day 2

DRIP - you wanna see something really scary?

A Garden of Mud and Stone: Part 2

A garden of mud and stone - part 1

I am The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Waters...

RIP Cyd Charisse

Congratulations Manchester United!

Screen YOUR film at ShAFF 2009

CLIFFHANGER 2008

The Yawning Man

'Klunkerz'; a film about mountain bike history, and ShAFF opening night

Sheffield Adventure Film Festival 2008 - ShAFF

How I got into mountain biking

Comet Holmes - Towser's comet

Just a cat: Farewell to Towser

VIRTUAL JUKEBOX FOR JULY, er....DECEMBER. DANCE!! (updated)

Sheffield Documentary Film Festival 2007

Mountain bike crashes

The return of Shirley Bassey

Spooky Woods, Glentress. Mountain bike heaven!

Blue tits and woodpeckers

Germaine Greer - feminist crumpet

Now That's What I Call Music, Volume 2

For whom The Bells, The Bells toll; a meeting with John Redhead

White Horses

Playing YouTube clips

Now that's what I call music, Volume 1

Lunar eclipse

The Epic

The cruelty of whaling in the 19th century

Sympathy for the Sea Devil

No need for whaling

List Of Contents

Sympathy for the Sea Devil

The Diver