those little green birds...
Shamed by my friend the museum curator, I decided to have a go at photographing the parakeets, with limited success. The light was at the wrong angle, at least that's my excuse. I have several pictures of small green birds silhouetted among green foliage.
At the risk of being accused of anthropomorphising, I'd claim that they were keeping a beedy and sarcastic overview of my efforts, and the moment I got close enough or at the right angle, off they shot, shouting in triumph. The enclosed rather blurred effort is of one sitting in the dead redwood tree. I'll try again soon.
late night seed shopping
I think there are risks entailed in being online late at night. On wednesday I went back to Kew to visit the Chihuly exhibition again, apart from being caught in a series of small but determined downpours it was a wholly pleasurable experience. On the whole I am bound to say that I was less impressed the second time around, I began to feel that the artist was not so much controlling the material as churning out vast amounts of stuff and working out what to do with it after.
The plants, however, were rocking, the palm house and the temperate house were performing to their best, the water lilies especially. My companion had a very nice camera and took some gorgeous photos, which you can see here, thanks hen : )
I saw a couple of plants that I have only seen in exotic flower stalls, protea was doing especially well in the glasshouses, and I was pleased to see that they had a musella lasiocarpa flowering.
I have to confess to a bit of careless shopping tonight though, I was very taken with a variety of strelitzia called juncea, which instead of having long banana like leaves has long whiplash leaves with a little frond at the end, so I was browsing my favourite exotic seed sellers, whatcom seeds. They haven't got S.Juncea, although they have got nicolae and mandelas gold. So, disappointed, I happened upon their protea, and had to have P.Cynaroides and P.Grandiceps, one thing lead to another, and I ordered
Ravenala Madagascariensis, the travellers palm. This is another member of the strelitzia family, the leaves are up to 20 feet long and it resembles a gigantic fennel bulb with huge banana leaves. I hope it doesn't grow too fast, although they claim it can be contained if pot grown.
I'll keep you posted...
http://seedrack.com/
they fought the dogs, and killed the cats...
This has been a bit of a rodent week; a few days ago, the semi-animate pyjama case that lives upstairs upped the ante on her hunting skills by bringing in a mouse. As with most of her 'kills' presumably she brought it in and let it go, because when discovered it was frantically zooming about and providing a great deal more entertainment than the frogs do (they just lie there and hope she'll go away, proving that frogs have a better insight into the feline psyche than most humans).
After a while the mouse inserted itself under the fridge, and normality resumed. The next day, the rodent was discovered swimming in the downstairs toilet and duly retrieved and liberated. The cat, however, has a new hobby, which goes nicely with her principle outdoor activity; staring at the bush that frogs come from, she has now added staring at the fridge to her repertoire.
For the last few weeks I have been helping an old school friend to demolish and reconstruct his house, and the other day I was blamelessly varnishing the doorframe when the local magpies started making a terrible racket. I ignored it for ages, until it eventually dawned on me that they were doing whatever they were doing just the other side of the garden wall from where I was working. I opened the gate and peered into the street to discover that they were squabbling over the corpse of a very small rat. It is reputed that in London you are never more than a few feet from a rat, but it is uncommon to see them in daylight (unless they happen to be dead, of course). A couple of days later, back at my friends house, I went outside to take a phone call, and was somewhat surprised to have another much bigger rat saunter past me, entirely unconcerned, and disappear into the pile of rubble sacks that litter the outdoor area.
This reminded me of another daytime rat encounter, one time when I was visiting the Park Royal branch of ASDA; as I walked along through the carpark towards the automatic doors I was bemused to notice that I had a little grey companion running along the side of the building parallel to me. The rat, which was quite a large one, got to the entrance lobby before I did, and as you can imagine, caused considerable excitement among the more observant shoppers who were trying to pick up their baskets. Fortunately there was another set of doors into the shop itself, and a rather nervous looking security guard to boot, I shouted at him to keep the doors closed and attempted to shoo the rat back out into the great outdoors. The rodent was being quite co-operative, but the automatic doors were proving to be a problem, as they kept opening and closing, confusing the poor beast, which eventually panicked and managed to insert itself into the space between the door and the glass outer wall. Consequently, every time the doors opened, it was being slid back and forth as if on a ghastly sort of bacon slicer. I got the guard to lock the doors open, and after a bit of hinting, the creature squeezed out of the gap, and shot off into the carpark, apparently unharmed.
My final rodent reminiscence dates back to the mid-80's, when I used to work at Riverside Studios, in Hammersmith. In a rare moment of creative energy, the management had decided to put on a play (normally Riverside was just a receiving house, not a producing one). They had chosen a new work by Gregory Motton, called 'Chicken' I can't remember much about the piece, although I seem to recollect that it covered the usual themes of urban desolation and deprivation that were obligatory in the Thatcher years. There was, however, a moment, one that I imagine the author had intended to be a 'coup de theatre', when a bin bag of rubbish was emptied out onto the stage and proved to be full of twenty to thirty dead rats. This caused us no end of problems in rehearsal, stuffed rats were way too expensive and bounced rather unconvincingly during testing. Rubber squeaky rats didn't even make it to the testing (although I did introduce one onto the toy train that used to trundle round the auditorium at Starlight Express, on which my partner of the time was working).
Someone, and I can't remember who, had a brainwave, and managed to blag thirty fresh, dead laboratory rats. The first snag was that they were white, so we had to dye them grey; it is not easy to find hair dye to make things go grey, mostly the operation is intended to work the other way round. Consequently we ended up mixing up a thin grey emulsion paint and hand painting them. The second problem was that the play was scheduled to run for a month, and with the best will in the world we couldn't keep the rats fresh for that long. Some genius rang up Walls, and managed to borrow an ice-cream freezer, so, every night the rats were popped back into the freezer.
For me, the dramatic moment, when the bin bag was emptied out, and the rats tipped onto the stage was somewhat compromised, as the rats were still hard frozen when they made their appearance, and tended to slide about, like furry ice-cubes. Not only that, but they made a strange clonking sound when they hit the ground, and, having been thawed and then refrozen the night before, they had often adopted weird contorted positions. The worst thing of all, for me, was their tails, as the thinnest part of the rat, these would thaw out the quickest in the forty minutes or so that they were under the lights. As often as not, one of the frozen rats would have ended up with its tail pointing straight up in the air, and slowly, gently, and with a ghastly inevitability the tail would descend towards the horizontal. It was only ever a tiny movement,and a tinier sound, but for me, it was more rivetting than anything else that happened on that stage. At the end of the run, the freezer was returned to Walls, without any mention of what it had been used for, think on that next time you have an ice-cream.
banana update
My banana seedlings are now large enough to register on a photo, so, for those who asked, here's a picture. The shoot in the foreground is Musa Ornata, the purple flowered banana, and the one in the background is currently unidentified. The other picture is of the more grown-up plants, Musella Lasiocarpa in the back, Musa Gran Nain in the middle and Musa Dwarf Orinoco.
They seem to be quite happy at the moment, the only thing that is suffering is my coffee plant, which really wants humidity and heat, currently we are getting one or the other and it is looking a bit sad.
Greeks bearing gifts, a visit to the theatre museum.
Last week I referred in passing to my having visited the Theatre Museum, the circumstances that took me there were a little odd;
I was sent an unsolicited e-mail asking me if I wanted to tender for a redesign and overhaul of the lighting of parts of the museum. In my industry, the museum is referred to with amused contempt. A branch of the V&A, it has a enormous archive of historical material, but is considered to have a rather lack-lustre and unimaginative exhibition. So, gentle reader, you can imagine that I was curious to see for myself.
The museum lurks underneath the London Transport museum, for whom I used to overhaul equipment many moons ago. To say that I was underwhelmed by the experience would be over-extending my enthusiasm, a theatre museum that was less imaginative and theatrical than weekly rep in Frinton on Sea (immortalised in the phrase; Harwich for the continent, Frinton for the incontinent). I was walking round with a curator (the one who had contacted me), and felt like a hapless royal being asked to judge a comedy vegetable competition. What could I say, the trompe l'oeil was piss-poor, the exhibitions tedious and the whole thing badly and witlessly lit. If I'd paid to get in I'd have wanted my money back.
There is a sub-text here, the redesign is being sponsored and driven by a major british lighting manufacturer, one with whom I grew up, and whose equipment I learned my craft with. Some time ago they made a marketing decision (driven by bean-counters one suspects), which unloaded a whole range of weird and only occasionally functional equipment into the industry, and continue to operate a policy of trying to establish monopolies wherever possible.
As I am not known to be diplomatic when I am presented with a piece of only semi-usable equipment, I didn't think that my potential contribution was likely to received with enthusiasm by the sponsor, so I was extremely circumspect when I put my proposal in, as I had no wish to give them my best ideas for free. Anodyne probably best describes my pitch, I'm a bit depressed, the museum could be so much better, but it is caught in between the rock of being an undervalued and underfunded outcrop of a major institution, and the hard place of being offered a free lunch which will lock them into what I would consider to be a very unhealthy and risky monopoly.
Oh, and much to my surprise, I got an e-mail thanking me for my time, and for my contribution to the design process, I must have said more than I meant to. In case it might be thought that I was being paranoid, I ought to point out that I am semi-sponsored by another lighting company, who have very thoughtfully and for no apparent reason supported a number of my stranger projects, the ones where there really was no money, and they have done this all over the world. I don't carry a torch for them, but I like their products and I appreciate their open-ended generosity. This contrasts ill-favourably with my experience with the british company when I was involved in a multi-million pound refurbishment project.
little green birds
The parakeets are much bolder now, although their habit is to fly high and swift, they have taken to one of our apple trees in a big way.
They still make a shocking noise, when they are approaching and surveying their target, but once they have decided to go for it, they are strangely unconcerned. You can walk right up to the tree, and within ten feet of a bird before they stop chomping , and start gazing with suspicion. Tonight I was watching a bird, and squeaking at it until it flew off, shrieking abuse, and walked on up the garden to pick some plums. It was only as I was picking my fruit that I realised that there were still three parakeets eating away, totally unconcerned. So we had a little moment; I ate my plums and watched them, and they ate their apples and watched me.
They are quite messy eaters, holding the apple in one foot, they carve chunks out of it, and mumble it around in their beaks. Rather a lot falls out the sides, like a friday night drunk with an overstuffed kebab.
Curiously, they only favour one tree, a James Grieve, all the others are ignored. All the apples are quite a long way off ripeness too, but I guess their little tummies can cope in ways that humans can't.
Some of our other fauna are still here too, the woodpecker (lesser spotted, I can now confirm) was drumming on the dead tree today, and there is a massive and very noisy flock of various tits who were eating greenfly off the golden gage as I came in.
useful terms
I was just going through some old production notes from my last opera tour, and came across a couple of delightful descriptive terms that I had never previously heard used.
These came from our company manager, who is pure roedean.
The first one she came out with was 'bingo wings' these are the loose flaps of skin as seen on the upper arms of ladies of a certain vintage, much in evidence when calling '
House!' and waving the arms about I guess.
I have only ever played bingo once, and that was at 2.00 a.m. in Blackpool, and what with a couple of small beers and a lavender suited (and wigged) Elvis impersonator I was unable to give the game my full attention.
The second term is 'pavement oysters' this describes the gobbets of phlegm that can be seen decorating the streets, very common in Glasgow, where a sizeable proportion of the population still smokes.
I don't know where she got these from, certainly not from Glasgow, I'm still trying to work them into my writing, but they are a bit too specific.
I'll give it some more thought.
if I had a hammer...
You would think that in my capacity as a practising theatre electrician the hammer would not loom too large as an essential part of the tool kit. They are used principally for tapping in the tapered pins that join certain types of lighting truss.
Factor into this my occasional deviations into prop fabrication and demolition and perhaps the presence of an odd hammer might be less of a surprise.
I counted up my hammers today, less because I was bored, rather that I keep tripping over them in unlikely places; I can positively state that I have sixteen. I have four claw hammers, three ball pein hammers, two lump hammers, two mallets, one brick hammer, one log maul, a tack hammer, a hatchet and a geologists hammer. What can I say, I like hammers, I just didn't realise that I was subconsciously accumulating them, like a nesting blacksmith.
This reminds me of a story that dates from my time at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, when it was occupying the middle floor of a former school building and not the swish site it has now. The upper and lower floors were used by Scarborough Tech. One day rehearsals were in progress as was the custom, but there was much more noise than usual from upstairs, in fact there was a great deal of banging, and this banging showed no sign of abating. After about an hour of this, Alan Aykbourn, who was directing, decided he'd had enough,and he'd go up and see if they could be persuaded to shut up. When he eventually returned, he was purple, and helpless with laughter; he had been taken to one side, and the tutor had explained with great seriousness that they couldn't stop, because they were having a hammering exam.
Dead wood
Our neighbours on the eastern boundary have a tree that died last year, I thought for years that it was a Larch, as it was a deciduous conifer. Subsequent investigations reveal that, in fact it was a species of Redwood, although, thankfully not the North-American Giant Redwood (sequoiadendron giganteum).
This is all well and good, but the fact remains that there is this dead tree, very tall and flag-pole straight which overlooks most of the gardens. Not surprisingly it is a favoured vantage point for many birds of a more cautious variety; most commonly the parakeets perch in it, in what I assume is some sort of pecking order. The bird at the top is usually the most vocal, and if and when it flies off, the others all follow.
Today I wandered down the garden and I could hear the beeping noise that lesser spotted woodpeckers make (not dissimilar to a blackbird alarm call, except it is a single note). Two days ago I had seen a bird on the tree, and it had flown away once it had realised it was the object of attention. Today, it was more interested in circling the trunk, and probing at what must be flaking bark.
As it worked its way up the tree, I was delighted to see another bird emerge from behind the trunk, about three feet further down, and in an amicable sort of way they continued to investigate the bark. I don't know where they might nest, there is not much in the way woodland round here, but the possibility that we have a breeding pair on our territory would be really pleasing.
Guns are fun, discuss...
I've just been on a little trip into town, to revisit the Jesuits and talk about cameras, and to visit the Theatre Museum and talk about design.
I'll blog the latter when I know a bit more about it. My trip was complicated by the obligatory security alert on the underground. Whilst I am not in any way suggesting that the current wave of terror alerts sweeping London (and other metropoli) shouldn't be taken seriously. I just can't help feeling that I wished that the gentlemen (and to a lesser extent ladies) of her majesties constabulary weren't having such tremendous fun.
Step back and look at it: they get to rush around without question, order people on and off the street, carry and brandish guns (the last time someone actually pointed a gun in my direction was in Derry, and it was a thirteen year-old squaddy peering from the back of his armoured landrover into the pub I was drinking in at the time), sometimes they even get to shoot people too.
I haven't yet spotted an armed policewoman, which tends to bear out my 'boys and toys' theory about the Met. I know they're out there, you can't watch a cop movie without a scene in a shooting range where female cops are lined up, blasting away at images of masculine oppression. Maybe our female cops are just more discreet than the men.
During the alert this afternoon, at embankment station, people were being progressively driven back up the street away from the station, to my jaundiced eye, this seemed to imply that the suspect package must at the very least have been a small thermonuclear device. Strangely, in the midst of the chaos of commuters, disenfranchised buskers and bewildered tourists, the two stall holders on either side of the station gates (flowers and Evening Standard) held fast to their posts. Presumably, in the event of an incident or outrage, Londoners in need of a post-diana grief fest would then be able to purchase their tear sodden bouquets on the spot, and The Standard (The Daily Mail in evening dress) would be able to confirm whether or not the terrorists were on benefit.
