Gardening gone flat

I grew up in a big country, with a big house, with a big back yard, with a big garden, with raspberries, peas, carrots, saskatoons, lettuce, beans, rhubarb, tomatoes, and even the occasional ambitious asparagus all home-grown. Now I live in a small country, in a small(ish) flat, with no yard, and therefor, no garden, and therefor, no berries.

Well that just won't do.

There's little as satisfying as growing your own produce. And, as every city-scale farmer will attest, it all tastes so much better than the supermarket stuff.

But the waiting list to get an allotment here in Bath is up to ten years long. So. What to do?

Build an indoor garden! I've got lots of sunny windows, and lots of ambition, so this is the season for trying. The 'still alive' list is, currently, as follows:

-3 Strawberry plants

-5 Pepper plants

-2 Tomato plants

-3 pots of spinach

-1 Basil

-1 Coriander

-1 Parsley (flat leaf)

-1 Chives (that s looks wrong, but I think it's right)

-About 1000 aphids, all on the strawberries. What? Huh? These are INDOOR plants! How did the aphids find out about them? Damn well-connected aphids. It a bid to crush their imperialist strawberry-takeover attempt, I've managed to trap and rehome three lady-bugs onto the plants, but they all seem to have disappeared. Talk about ungrateful. Free all you can eat buffet, and nothing, no help at all. More on this battle as it continues.

Unexpected chord.

Did some freelance recording for this nice-guy-nice-music Rob Bray. He made a funny little music video out of it. Don't mind the somewhat startling final chord. Or the are-they-or-aren't-they high bits near the end. Do mind the clip of me finishing a passage and starting to talk the moment my bows leaves the string. And the bird puppet.

a little silhouetto

Just a quick note to say:

Yesterday I recorded in the studio where Bohemian Rhapsody was recorded.

Wow. Powerful stuff.

Pulp non-fiction

I don't like to watch Quentin Tarantino films.

I hear they're good.

I believe they're intelligent.

They have good soundtracks.

But I don't like to watch them.

Because I don't like violence. I don't like watching it, real or fictitious, and, I don't understand society's fascination with it.

Especially random violence. It doesn't make sense, not even evolutionarily. (I could elaborate here, but I won't. You're quick enough to get where I'm coming from, right? Right.)

So, to the random nose-smashers of last night's London, why? Not a despairing, rhetorical, fist-at-the-sky 'Why?', but seriously, why? Couldn't you use that energy climbing, riding, making, finding, learning, writing, growing, teaching, moving, exploring or playing something? Honestly, I want to know, why?

This way up.

I was a head in a box the other day. Actually, the whole band were. Six of us. Six heads in six boxes. (Actually, that's wrong, five of us were in boxes, Neil was in a suitcase.) Boxes on the floor with just our heads and some packing materials (some had styrofoam, some straw, I had newspaper). A little girl came around and opened the boxes and we sang at her. Nicely.

We filmed part of a soon-to-be-released music video the other day.

Anyone want to guess which state-of-the-art effects we used to do this?

(For the second filming we get to be hanging from trees...)