Nautilus

Posted on 2 July 2021 by Henry Gee

I really can’t believe it.

I’ve been writing books for thirty years, but have never seen the anticipation that’s buzzing around my fifthforthcoming tome, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth.

When a book of mine is published, it’s usual for me to receive translation offers in one or two languages, but only after it’s been out for some time. This time, it’s racked up twelve translation-rights sales, even before it’s out in English. Dutch and German editions are in preparation – editions are projected in simplified Chinese, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Spanish.

Such is the buzz that I have engaged the services of a PR company to capitalize on the interest in the US and Canada, to promote the edition from St Martin’s Press, published on  2 November. Picador, which publishes the UK+Commonwealth edition on 16 September, is doing the publicity in-house.

Not that I can’t get away without doing some initial spadework – the PR people don’t know me from any other Joe, so I have been busy updating my various social media profiles, constructing this useful website and facebook page.

But what I am looking forward to most is recording the audiobook. As far as I can judge from rankings on Amazon (ever a delphic measure), pre-orders for the book have been stronger for this format than for the print or electronic versions.

The audiobook people originally wanted me to come into a studio to do the recording. However, thanks to the proficiency I’ve gained by recording music during lockdown in Flabbey Road, my home studio, they are letting me do it all by myself, on my own, unaccompanied, and, what’s more, tout seul.

Inside Flabbey Road. Recently. Note home-made pop-shield on microphone.

Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, I can get to add some music, so I have been thinking up some themes.

To help me with this I have brought in the heavy brigade in the form of a Korg Nautilus, the kind of keyboard that composers use to create film soundtracks. The cinematic hugeness should, I hope, augment the book rather than swamp it (though I will have a producer to curb my worst excesses).

One of the primary sauces tzores sources of inspiration for the book was Life On Earth, a documentary series by David Attenborough from the 1970s. This transfixed the teenage Gee. Even though everyone remembers the (for the time) astonishing visuals, what captivated me just as much, at the time, was the soundtrack. I can’t remember much about it now, except that there was a lone horn figure at the end of the title music that it was both haunting and majestic. While I was writing A (Very) Short History, music was very much on my mind, so I welcome the chance to add some of my own to my narration. It should alleviate the boring drone of my voice, at least.

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Pride

Posted on 12 June 2021 by Henry Gee

Here’s a story about Pride, and the best party I ever attended.

It started in 2017, when the Gees had a wonderful family holiday in Northumbria. The fact that I could never seem to find Hadrian’s Wall, no matter how manically I drove along country lanes trying to find it, became a family joke. I had somehow expected some imposing structure like the Great Wall of China when, in fact, much of it has disappeared and the parts that survive are rather modest.

The following year Mrs Gee booked me and Offspring#1 (my regular hiking partner) into an establishment called the Hadrian Hotel in a village called Wall. ‘If you can’t find Hadrian’s Wall from the Hadrian Hotel in a village called Wall,’ she said, ‘then you are beyond hope’. So Offspring#1 and I traveled to the village called Wall, stayed in the Hadrian Hotel, and, after some hiking around, discovered Hadrian’s Wall to our mutual satisfaction. After that we traveled north, to Stirling, so we could visit Doune Castle, location for many of the castle shots in our favourite film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After much French Taunting, we drove south for the final leg of our three-centre holiday — Nottingham, where Offspring#1 is a medical student and a rising star in the LBGTQ+ community, and was due to do a cabaret turn in the DirtyFilthySexy Pride After-Party.

So there we were, and while Offspring#1 got trogged up, I nursed a pint in the bar and read a book. I am not a party animal. Having scored fairly highly on Simon Baron Cohen’s Asperg-O-Meter, I am not especially gregarious. I can never really see the point of parties, and, if I ever go to one, I’ll be in the kitchen, or somewhere on the fringes, or even not there at all, having made my excuses and left.

But then, something happened. The records they were playing in the next room weren’t thumpity-thump club beats, but disco classics from my childhood. I finished my pint and migrated to the disco, taking up a station in a dark corner on the wall, away from the flashing lights.

My feet started to move.

I got up.

I started to … dance.

So did everyone else. The go-go dancers on the stage were sexy. The harness-clad leather boys that followed were … interesting. I even managed something I have never done at a party, ever — I pulled. (He wasn’t my type). The cabaret was a lot of fun (and Offspring#1’s turn was fantastic, but I would say that, as I’m biased). After the cabaret I continued to dance. I was still dancing at 1 a.m., although more slowly, because I was getting tired, and, by then, the dance floor had become rather sticky. I didn’t know this then, but Offspring#1, in the Green Room, was trying to find me and asked their drag-act friends where I might be.

‘What’s he look like?’

‘Fifty-something. Beardy.’

‘Oh yes – he’s still on the dance floor.’

Offspring#1 sent out a search party. Thus it was that I was approached by a drag queen, at least six-foot-six foot tall (must have been the heels) and resplendent in purple taffeta and glitter, who asked me in stentorian tones, ‘Are you Offspring#1’s Mum?’

I said that I was, and remarked how much I was enjoying the party, and how I didn’t usually go in for such things, especially not the part about boogying until the small hours, as I wasn’t as young as I looked. ‘Yes, we all have that problem’, said my interlocutrix, who wafted off Offspring#1-wards.

How did a heterosexual and blokey and habitually non-partygoing person (that’s me) enjoy this party so much?

It didn’t take me long to work it out.

The reason was this – that everyone came not as the persona they are usually required to adopt to fit into everyday society, but as the persona they felt themselves to be, whether they were in street clothes or the most elaborate gender-bending confections imaginable. Everyone was, therefore, relaxed. Each person was there to enjoy themselves and have fun with other similarly-minded people, not to fulfil any prior expectations of what they ought to be, or do. As Nietzsche once wrote, to be is to do. And as Sinatra added, do-be-do-be-do. It didn’t matter if you were straight, L, G, B, T, Q, or even +. The important thing was to be there.

As someone who scores highly on the Baron Cohen Asperg-O-Meter, what I value in people is honesty. That’s why I loved being an undergraduate in Leeds, in Yorkshire, where everyone calls a spade a vertically operated digging implement, but didn’t really get on at Cambridge, where many people seem to have a ‘side’. The thing about the DirtyFilthySexy party was its honesty. It may seem highly contrived if, say, a marketing manager called Kevin comes out at weekends as a vampish dominatrix called Lola – but it is not contrived at all if Lola is the persona in which that person feels more themselves, more honest, more real.

I was struck by a sentence in a book about the style known as ‘camp’. (The book was called Camp, but I can’t locate it right now). The essence of camp, said this book, was a kind of knowingness — that even though we live in a fallen and damaged world, we should strive for innocence.

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Wild!

Posted on 31 May 2021 by Henry Gee

Cromer is going wild!

This notice from my daily constitutional shows that a small corner of a park, wedged between a childrens’ playground and the bowls club, is being allowed to let its hair down.

I suspect that this will lead to a bit of moaning, as the first stages of rewilding are rather scruffy, consisting of infestations of triffids stinging nettles and brambles, before the ground settles down into what we scientific types call ‘climax’ vegetation.

 

 

 

 

In fact, one doesn’t have to walk very far from this notice to see rewilding in its more advanced stages.

This picture (left) shows a sward of grass and other weedy plants (goose grass, cow parsley and so on) with tall young conifers in the background. If left to its own devices long enough this will turn into something like this…

 

 

 

 

 

 

… a sylvan glade of mature, deciduous trees such as beech and oak.

All it takes is time – but not as much time as you’d think.

These two pictures were taken in a patch of land only a few acres in extent that sits almost unnoticed between a council estate, a farmer’s field, a go-karting track and a country lane. When you’re in the woods it seems a lot bigger – especially when the trees are in leaf. Over the past year or so I’ve followed the progress of the wood, starting with snowdrops, then bluebells, then horse-parsley or alexanders (a kind of green umbellifer that grows well near the coast), then proper cow parsley and a riot of speedwell and red campion and ferns and goodness knows what (don’t shoot me, I’m not a botanist), leading to foxgloves and so on and so forth: in the autumn, sloes and brambles yield their bounty, and mushrooms sprout beneath, all under a canopy of beech, oak, sycamore, holly and pine of very all ages. Roe deer and muntjacs are a common sight, passing silently between the trees. Woodpeckers rattle away above my head, while jays and magpies and .. er … other birds flit between the trunks (I’m not an ornithologist, either).

You’d think it had been there for, like, ever.

You’d be wrong.

For a brief period at the end of the nineteenth century, Cromer was a tourist magnet, served by not just one but two yes two count ’em TWO railway lines, and this woodland was a writhing mass of lines and railway-related impedimenta where the lines crossed. One line led to a terminus at Cromer High: another sidled off eastwards to Overstrand (much more fashionable than Cromer, still has houses designed by Lutyens). Cromer High station no longer exists. Overstrand station, likewise, has been consigned to history. Today’s railway station, once called Cromer Beach, and now just called Cromer, is some way to the west. In the 1960s Dr Beeching made his infamous cuts — and, what with one thing and another, the land has gone back to nature. In less than a single human lifetime.

It might come as a surprise, given the often well-advertised hand-wringing about the state of the environment, that the UK has more woodland now than at any time since the Middle Ages. Back at the time of the Domesday Book, some 15% of England was forested, declining to around 8% in the 17th Century. In 1905 – the first date when definite records started to be kept — only 5.2% of England (681,000 hectares) was forested. By 2018, the area had almost doubled, to 10% (1,241,000 hectares). The figures for the whole of the UK are more startling still — from 4.7% (1,140,000 hectares) in 1905, to 13.1% (3,173,000) in 2018. And all this given that the population of the UK was just 38 million in 1901, and, as of today, it’s 68,214,575. Not quite a doubling, whereas the area of woodland has almost tripled over approximately the same period. So, contrary to what one might believe, the growth rate of woodland over the past century or so has outstripped that of the human population.

To be sure, some of this forest will be diversity-poor conifer plantation; there is precious little woodland that one could call ‘ancient’; and all woodland in the UK, these days, requires a certain amount of management. But once one adds up all the seemingly neglected wedges of woods that clothe what once groaned under the fires of industry and the clank of the locomotive, it comes to a bucolic lot.

The benefits are manifold. In 2017 alone, the UK’s woods removed enough air pollution to save the health service almost a billion pounds. Over the same period, the UK’s woodlands soaked up 18.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 4% of total UK greenhouse gas emissions. And they do this without any fuss, all the while allowing me and my dogs a restful and healthful refuge during our daily walks.

I have come to value our woods during the past year or so. So have many other people. Our woods are a resource that should be treasured.

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Rock

Posted on 13 May 2021 by Henry Gee

There’s been a lot of it about. Musicians, that is, unable to play live during lockdown, finding other ways to express themselves. During the recent hiatus I have become very keen on home recording, and some of the results are available commercially (you can browse them here). Much of this is done all on my own, tout seul, and, what’s more, in the absence of others. An exception has been this, a collaboration between me and an old friend, Mr A. T. of Bracknell.

This. Recently.

At least twenty years ago, A. T. and I were in the same band, both together, at once, simultaneously and at the same time. As someone once said, much water has been passed since then. A. T. has since turned professional, teaches guitar, and plays guitar and drums in a variety of outfits notably the Voodoo Sheiks. It was the Voodoo Sheiks that got Adrian (that’s his name) and I back together.

Like me, Adrian had started to explore home recording and had asked a number of his friends to send bits and pieces to his ongoing Blues Alliance collaboration (you can hear an example here). Adrian also asked me to contribute keyboards to the Voodoo Sheik’s single, Norm (now available through Apple Music). One thing led to another, and, what with my finding a songwriting hot streak and a need for a guitarist better than me [that’ll be any guitarist at all, then – Ed] to turn my ideas into reality, Adrian was only too happy to oblige. The result has been our collaboration G&T and our album Ice & A Slice, now available on Apple Music.

Ice and a Slice is a 9-track, 56-minute album that owes quite a lot to our formative years listening to rock in the 70s and 80s. There are some more-or-less obvious nods to Deep Purple (Indigo), Pink Floyd (Lorem Ipsum), Status Quo (Red), Jeff Beck (Silver Lining), and Joe Satriani (Bunky Flooze). I’d come up with backing tracks in my home studio Flabbey Road, email them to Adrian, who’d send back loads of separate guitar tracks done in ProSonus. I’d mix them all into GarageBand, duplicating, splitting and harmonising as I went. I think at one point there were 22 separate guitar tracks in my 80s-stadium-rock-power-ballad Slow Burn, though in my West-Coast style jangly choral pop tune Was That You? I lost count of the number of vocal tracks once they’d passed 30.

Adrian and I had so much fun with G&T that we might be back for a second round. Watch this space.

MUSOS’ CORNER: For this recording, I’d do the backing track on Garageband 11 and email a rough mix to Adrian.

He’d then add the guitar parts, zip them up for easy emailing and send them to me. I’d unpack them, paste each guitar part into its own track in Garageband, and get mixing.

Adrian’s guitars were (in no particular order, as they say on all the game shows) a Fender Telecaster; two Fender Stratocasters; a PRS Custom 24; a Gibson SG, and an Ernie Ball Musicman. All were played through a Mesa Boogie Mk5:25 amplifier and from that,  a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface and into ProSonus Studio 1 Professional 4.5.

All the bass and drums and a few of the keyboard sounds come from GarageBand 11. Apart from that, the keyboards used were a Yamaha Clavinova CLP800 (mainly for piano, but there’s a cathedral organ at the end of Lorem Ipsum); and a Crumar Mojo 61 (Hammond organ, Rhodes piano and clavinet).

The rest came from apps on my iPad Mk2 played either from the iPad itself or from a M-Audio Keystation 49 Mk3. The apps included a Minimoog Model D, ARP Odyssey, Korg iMS20, Oberheim OBXd, Solina string ensemble, Mellotron XL, Tal-U-No-LX (basically, a Roland Juno 60) and Magellan2 synth. All non-Garageband, non-guitar sounds, including vocals (recorded with a no-name dynamic microphone) went through a Behringer Xenyx 802 mixer and into the computer. Monitoring was through a Behringer Xenyx 302 mixer into Beyer Dynamic headphones.

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Allotment

Posted on 3 May 2021 by Henry Gee

Many years ago when the Gees lived in east London, and I commuted regularly to an orifice office that was located away from my home [fancy! did they still have typewriters? Horse-drawn omnibuses? Public executions? – Ed]  I had an allotment. It was conveniently placed between our home and the tube station, so even on working days I could pop in, especially on summer evenings after work, when I could water things and come home with a bag of salad.

I loved my allotment. The Offspring enjoyed it, too. Our plot in London was bounded on one side by an abandoned patch on which fruit bushes had been allowed to run riot; and on the other by a plot laid out to grass, which I rented as an add-on to my own. I mowed a maze in the grass, and, when the Offspring had collected enough currants and blackberries on one side, they’d set themselves up inside the maze on the other, for a picnic. One gloriously sunny day in July I went to the allotment with the Offspring and spent a happy timeless time watering, tending, hoeing and harvesting, and when I had done pretty much everything I needed to do, I summoned the Offspring (they were aged about 7 and 5) for the short walk home. ‘Please can we stay for a few more hours?’ came the plaintive cry from somewhere in the tall grass.

But that was then. We moved to Cromer in 2006, and although we are blessed with a large garden, we have never had a vegetable patch of any size. And I have always missed my allotment. Until recently Mrs Gee has been head gardener and she likes to grow things in pots, on a smaller scale, though we’ve usually had a few vegetables and herbs for the table. This year, however, she is too busy for gardening as she’s doing Other Stuff (she is embarking on her Third Career) so I have stepped in. Think of me as Mellors to her Lady Chatterley. On second thoughts, don’t.

The Blessed Plot.

So I get to do things my way, and I have cleared a sizeable patch of ground on the sunny side of the garden for a plot. And here it is. The polytunnel in the background is the chicken coop: to the right of the path is the shady side of the garden, currently a shrubbery-in-progress, though some of it will be turfed in August, when one does turf. Regular readers of these annals will recognize this garden from earlier posts, of course. Over the past month I’ve sown potatoes, red onions, garlic, carrots, radishes, something called garlic kale, and dwarf French beans. So far the radishes have shot up – you can just about see them in a small green dotted line in front of my kneeling-plank. The garlic is following, as are the onions, although at a more leisurely pace. The carrots might just be starting to peep above ground though as yet there are no signs of spuds. I’ve sown some cucumber seeds in a propagating tray on a windowsill. After a promised spell of bad weather I’ll tidy up the front garden, plant a pumpkin in a planter, sow some lettuces and rocket and endive and… and … and …

Watching the plants grow is a never-ending sauce tzores source of delight, and having them in neat rows will make it easier to keep the weeds down (in the past we’ve hosted what looks like the British National Collection of stinging nettles).

And I have found something very surprising.

I love digging. I’ll say it again. I LOVE DIGGING. Give me my extra-long steel back-saver spade and I can dig (almost) indefinitely. I’m starting to get the kind of endorphin buzz that athletes do from running. It never used to be like this – but over the past year I have shed five or six kilos and have had a lot more exercise than usual. This means I am fit enough – just – to start to enjoy digging, rather than finding it a back-breaking chore.

More from the allotment as things shoot up.

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Egg

Posted on 31 March 2021 by Henry Gee

This is a egg.

A egg. Recently.

Now, you might say, so what, that looks just like any old egg. But the main thing about this egg is that it was laid by one of our own hens. This is remarkable. Now, we’ve had hens for more than a decade, but ours haven’t laid anything since last summer. Not a thing. It’s perhaps not surprising, as our hens aren’t really the best layers. The flock is ageing and some have died off. Only seven are left. Of these, only two — Bluebell and Esther — are what one might call layers. Two others — Poppet and Widget — belong to a fancy breed, more ornamental than egg-layers. The final three — Angelica, Eliza and Truly Scrumptious — are what one might call retired hens, or what others might call old boilers. Oddly, though, it was either Poppet or Widget that laid this egg.

But the timing is apposite. It’s spring, and we are in the middle of Passover, the second of three spring festivals. The first was Holi, just passed, and the third, Easter, is next week. And these are only the ones I know about: I’d have been completely ignorant of Holi had I not read A Suitable Boy last year. So it’s welcome to have an egg, just at this time of year.

It’s also the time of year, as the days lengthen and become warmer, when one gets the garden into gear. This year I have marked out quite a large area of the garden as a vegetable plot. It’s been used for this and that over the years — shrubbery, occasional part-time veg plot, chicken run, duck enclosure — so I thought it time to dig it over thoroughly and clear out any potential nasties. This means double digging.

The Trench Begins

What this means is digging a whacking huge great trench, as you can see on the left, probably a bit deeper than one would usually dig, and barrowing the enormous volume of soil to the other end of the plot for later use (be patient, I shall get to that part).

Double digging is great to get the ground into shape. It’s the best chance one will get to rid the ground of weeds, old pieces of rubble and assorted rubbish, and you never know what one might find. In this one trench I recovered the Ark of the Covenant and the Lost Chord.

When the trench is dug, you can start to dig another row, back-filling the first trench with the soil thus turned over, and creating a new trench, like this:

 

 

 

 

Further Entrenchment

So, basically, what happens is that the trench moves from one end of the plot to the other, rather like holes moving through a semiconductor (a nice solid-state physics reference there). When you reach the far end of the plot you can then fill in the remaining trench with the left-over soil from the first trench.

Or at least, that’s the theory.

In practice I find that one has a lot of soil left over, given that uncompacted soil takes up much more space in a heap than it does when stuck together in the ground. This doesn’t matter, as that soil, now dug over and freed from rubbish and weeds, can be used to fill pots, mix with compost to propagate seeds, and so on.

Over the coming long Easter Weekend I’ll be working off the eggy eggcess of a Passover diet, digging the whole plot, and getting some spuds, garlic and shallots in. And maybe some baby leeks.

 

 

UPDATE! Here’s the plot, almost done (somewhat later). As you see the trench has moved down to the far end. You can just make out my spade in the distance, together with the wheelbarrow on top of the large pile of earth dug out of the first trench. You might be wondering about the large blue tarpaulin – this covered the entire plot, and I rolled it back, row by row, as I went.

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Chair

Posted on 21 March 2021 by Henry Gee

You’ll both no doubt recall an earlier post in which I showed an heirloom chair — one of six — that had been rendered useless (at least as a chair) by the depredations of a teething puppy. Here it is, as a reminder. The chair, that is. I’m happy to say that the same chair has been restored, and can now be used once again as a chair.

A Much-Abused Heirloom. Recently.

… and now, restored

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The restorer was my friend C. F. of Cromer, who chisels away in his garage shed man cave workshop under the name Verdant Woodcraft, in much the same way that Winnie-the-Pooh lived under the name of Sanders.

He (that’s Mr C. F., not Winnie-the-Pooh) now has another one of the six chairs to restore, happily not as badly damaged as the one above. He was able to restore the chair using bits of a large slab of mahogany I bought from a reclamation yard once, with a view to making something or other, but I never did, so I gave it to C. F. instead. I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s made far better use of it than I ever could.

If you look at the Verdant Woodcraft facebook page you’ll see that Mr C. F. has a way with wood. He takes commissions, you know.

And the puppy seems to have grown out of chewing the furniture.

 

 

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Sartre

Posted on 13 March 2021 by Henry Gee

‘Hell’, said Jean-Paul Sartre, is ‘Other People’. Although I expect he said it in French. And well might I sympathize. Much has been said about the mental health problems of people suffering from the absence of human contact during the Current Crisis. Rather less has been noised concerning curmudgeons misanthropes people such as myself who find the absence of human contact something of a relief, and who are not particularly looking forward to the New Normal, whatever that may be. So much so that when the dogs take me for my daily amble, when I see the merest speck of another person on some far horizon, I walk smartly in the opposite direction. The prospect of Other People has even kept me and the dogs away from the beach — even the fairly remote beach we usually frequent.

Needless to say, so I’ll say it, the prospect of traveling on public transport — trains, for example, still less the London Underground — fills me with nauseous dread and horror. I’ve become really used to meeting people remotely, by Zoom (other Modes of Video Communication are available). Such things offer immense advantages – for example, I can now visit scientists and laboratories as part of my job (I’m with the Submerged Log Company) without the inconvenience of having to leave home. It’s now possible for me to visit places that might have been out of bounds for reasons of security, difficulty, restrictions, or expense. I have to say that this newfangled remote working technology is marvelous. My, should you visit Kansas City, you can walk the privies in the rain and never wet yer feet. As Rogers and Hammerstein said. I think it was them. Anyway, it doesn’t sound much like Sartre.

But I digress.

<- What you see here is an eight-yard skip, or dumpster. That is to say, it’s a large metal box that holds eight cubic yards of stuff, which a refuse disposal company, for a fee, will take away and dispose of, subject to certain limitations (no liquids, paint cans, TV or computer monitors, mattresses, and a few other bits and pieces).

I had it delivered to the Maison des Girrafes so I could use it to rid the environs of the incredible amount of ivy with which it had lately become infested, as I wrote earlier in these annals. But it was also an opportunity to clear a lot of house and garden trash that had accumulated in especial during lockdown, and, indeed, before, becoming so much a part of the furniture, as it were, that one could live one’s life without really noticing it, until it was gone. An effect of this (the not noticing, I mean) is that one underestimates the amount of tchotchkes, bibelots, gewgaws, gadgets, knicknacks, non-working items of stuff, old pieces of stick, furniture that had become chewed by the dogs to beyond the point of salvation, whiskers on kittens, plastic plant pots that had been used and re-used so often that they had become so brittle that they shattered when handled, warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with string, and so on and so forth fifth forth in like fashion — until one tries to shift it. I filled the eight-yard skip without really trying, when I thought I’d have room, and to spare. Reader, I have ordered another. I have already accumulated enough garden refuse to fill that, and, after that, I still have a heap of black sacks in the loft to shift.

Why have I not taken all this to the municipal recycling centre, I hear you cry? In normal times, much of this would have gone to that Temple of the Latter-Day Gods, where one divests oneself of Worldly Goods and therefore feels Elevated, even Cleansed, with the Kindly Assistance of the attendant Priests in their Overalls, High-Viz Jackets and Hard Hats, yea, and Cleaving to the Path of Righteousness as one isn’t adding to the amount of landfill. But these aren’t normal times. As I don’t need to tell you.

It does, however, fill me with a degree of shame that we have all this stuff to begin with, such that the disposal of selfsame stuff poses logistical problems. Should they be healthy and adequately fed, watered and sheltered (and many people in the world still strive for such basic amenities) most people seem to manage fairly handily with hardly more than the clothes they stand up in. I discovered this when I visited a field camp in Kenya the other day (gosh, was it really 1998?) and did very well with virtually nothing, which is the ground state of most of the Kenyans with whom I worked. It is an irony of modern times that, given the chance, we tend to surround ourselves with tchotchkes, bibelots, gewgaws, gadgets, knicknacks, &c., &c., while all the time wishing for a simpler kind of life. Hence the success of Marie Kondo and her aim of disclutterating our lives. What she is selling, and very successfully, is a dream, an aspiration, something to aim for, if not necessarily to achieve.

I disclutter on, that unattainable goal in mind.

 

 

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Pliny

Posted on 27 February 2021 by Henry Gee

Pliny the Elder, yes, that’s the one, the author of Natural History, which got a very poor review on Goodreads at the time, one reader castigating the author as ‘that voluminous, industrious, unphilosophical, gullible, unsystematic old gossip’, who nevertheless died as philosophical a death as you please when studying the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, yes, the same that barbecued Pompeii and turned Herculaneum into a mixed grill, who once said words to the effect of post coitum omne animalia triste sunt, or it might have been Galen, but whoever it was definitely had a point, except that I’d like to modify it to something about authors who’ve just delivered their final manuscript to their publisher, which is what I’ve done, so maybe an apposite quote [summons Google Translate] might be something like Dimisso manuscriptumtitum ad ultimum edidisse omnes auctores tristes. I feel as weak as a kitten though my mind is freewheeling so fast it’s a wonder the wheels don’t all fly off in different directions and the whole contraption ends up in a ditch. My head aches. My dream life is rich, textured and thoroughly confused.

I got the edited manuscript of A (Very) Short History of Sex and Chocolate [this appears to be a working title] from my editor on Monday morning. After receiving it I worked at it morning night and afternoon so by Thursday night I could send it back again, t’s crossed, i’s dotted and all shipshape and with all the words in the correct order. It helped that the editor was very sensitive and minimally invasive, so almost no reconstructive surgery was required — all the editor did was curb my more polyfloristic literary excesses, but no matter, you’ll get them all here on this blog, yes, both of you, look at me when I’m talking to you and sit up straight. Unlike a rather erudite novel I’m reading it doesn’t contain any words that you won’t be familiar with, such as hetaera, incunabulum or ambry, all new ones on me, unless of course you’ve never met words such as scansioripterygid or procolophonid. But hey, that’s science for you, never use one syllable when you can have three, preferably in Latin. Unless it’s Yi, which happens to be a scansioripterygid. Funny old world, isn’t it? Pliny would have understood. I miss him.

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Cool

Posted on 20 February 2021 by Henry Gee

What difference a couple of weeks makes. Recall that earlier this month I was out in a blizzard trying to secure a tarpaulin over the hen run, all the while running the risk of hypothermia, or at the very least playing a bit part in a painting by Marc Chagall.

Much the same as then, but now.

Well, all change. Here is much the same scene as then, but taken earlier today.

As you can see I removed the gloomy old tarp from the hen run and replaced it with a fresh sheet of clear plastic, so the hens can get some daylight.

And what daylight we are having. The days are noticeably longer and the weather is milder. Two weeks ago I was dressed up as a polar explorer. Today I was doing the garden in a T-shirt. It was wonderful to feel the sun again.

The astute reader will note that I found another use for the tarp – I spread it on the piece of ground where, in a month or so, I’ll start digging and raking and staking out this year’s veg plot. I also neatened up the fence alongside.

Now, everyone knows that February is absolutely the worst month in the garden. Everything looks tatty and horrible. But the days are longer, allowing for more tidying-up time, and soon I’ll be sowing and planting and we shall have breakfast outdoors and there’ll be buttered scones for tea. At half past three. Or words to that effect. Other bakery products are available. (Closed Wednesdays).

Tomorrow I’m going to prune the apple tree.

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