I am returned from London after a long and dull day. Forgive me while I do a bit of travel grumbling. It won’t take a minute, I promise.
Right. I am beetling my way towards the station to catch the train to London where I been invited by the delightful Tamsin (and equally delightful but in a different way Adrian) Slatter to sit at their table for the Landscape Institute Awards. All fine, a straightforward and simple journey beckons. But, such complacency arouses the mischief of the Gods and the first problem is that there are absolutely no car parking spaces around Milton Keynes, this in a place designed to be mostly car park. I eventually end up on the far side of Argos, miles away from Platform 4 and in the time it has taken to find a place I have missed two perfectly good trains. I then run to the station and miss another one by twelve seconds. Okay. We re-group, it is not the end of the world. I may miss the canapés and a bit of random mingling. I then get on a train which beetles along for a while and then stops, unexpectedly in Tring (i). And stays there for an unnecessary length of time: we could have got out and visited the Zoological Museum (ii), had a cup of tea and been back in our seats with time to spare. It then made other unscheduled stops at Hemel Hepstead, Watford Junction and Wembley Central.
Honestly, it was as if the train had been possessed by the soul of a newly installed suffragan Bishop eager to show off his new mitre and gremiale in every parish in the county.
Eventually, over an hour and a bit later, we arrived in London’s Euston Station. Signal problems had done for us.
They had also done for my lunch – those of you in sound mind will recall that the original intention of this journey was to have lunch and clap as awards were given to deserving Landscape architects. I was now two hours late and all that remained was a dollop of melting ice cream and the three chocolates that nobody else wanted. I arrived just in time to hear Tim Smit make a very good speech about the importance of beauty and how important language was in things and how one should never use language at work that would not fit into romantic fiction. At the Eden Project they fine people who use managerial language like “blue sky thinking”, “cutting edge”, “outside the envelope” etc etc.
He would have cleaned up at these awards if those rules still applied.
Among the nominees and winners were things like: “A Public Realm Design Guide for Hostile Vehicle Mitigation” or “Resilient Landscapes: What are they and how Useful is it for Landscape Architects to Adopt the Concept as a New Design Paradigm?” , “The Ingrebourne Valley Wayfinding Strategy” and “The Sensitivities of the Coastal Landscapes and Seascapes of Wales to Tidal Stream Developments”. I am sure they are all very worthy but suitable language for Romantic fiction? You would have to be pretty perverse to find any of that even faintly stimulating.
The images did not help much either, various pictures of roads and car parks. It was, I am afraid, an extraordinarily dull way to spend an afternoon which makes me sound fearfully ungrateful, I am not: the company on our table was delightful. It is just that the projects were so obfuscated with jargon and presented so uninspiringly that the minutes dragged. These are the people responsible for our parks and public spaces, our town centres and highways: they have an enormous responsibility (and pretty decent budgets looking at the number of people involved in each project) and opportunity to dramatically improve the ways we live. In some instances they do just that (there was a good scheme at Arnold Circus in London) but it is all about by-ways and access routes and interaction and social engineering: all very important, I know, but not exactly thrilling.
There was not a squat or jot about beauty which is a great pity. Bring a bit more poetry into the proceedings. And put some life and excitement into your awards please. You (and we) deserve it.
Apart from that I have also been to Haywards Heath to see a garden called Borde Hill, to Devon to see a rather fine thatched farmhouse, to Windsor to talk about hedges, to London to attend the Chelsea Flower Show selection panel meeting and to see Wild Beasts in Oxford (iii).
I am listening to Grinnin’ In Your Face by John Mooney. This time last year I was watching breakfast television.
The moustaches are growing very well as you can see here. We have raised over £9,000.00 in the past three weeks which is amazing. Thank you to all of you who have donated – either your faces or your fivers. We have filmed a Three Men special in celebration:
The picture is of the stems of Rosa laevigata Coopers Burmese.
(i) Which always sounds like a nice place. It reminds me of the sort of bell that rings when you open the door to a particularly interesting shop. Selling sweets or buns or exquisite propelling pencils or long stripy socks. The owner is behind a glass topped counter wearing a brown serge apron. His shirt sleeves are kept conveniently hitched by those metal springy things specifically designed to keep your sleeves out of soup or wet ink.
(ii) Formerly home to the largest collection of stuffed animals in the world.
(iii) The band: not buffalo in Balliol or warthogs in Wolfson.
Cleve looks like he is due a run in with The Man With No Name. Yours bears a passing resemblance to what the Lovely Howard grows when he stops shaving for a few days to show work he’s frazzled trying to work to several deadlines at once. I have described it as looking like he has a small hedgehog clamped to his chin.
Still stuck indoors swearing at daytime telly and wielding graph paper and watercolour pencils to revamp the allotment and garden plans here. Current estimated day of release from plaster is 14th December, though have been warned it may be extended if I continue to walk on the afflicted ankle and reopen the fracture.
Have found out that one of the larger garden centres in Hertfordshire loans wheelchairs to visitors, so we plan to go there this weekend or next. In the meantime, Howard has been following my detailed instructions, plus additional advice shouted down the stairs, to keep more or less up to speed on garden tasks (bar the fruit tree pruning at the allotment).
I am not sure if you are making the most of this period of enforced idleness.
Have you watched any Fred Astaire films? or The Karate Kid ?
Or eaten an entire packet of jelly babies by colour?
Or catalogued your photographs?
Or sorted your socks?
I’m more of a Dame Margaret Rutherford girl to be honest. Has been suggested I should watch Rear Window, for some reason, even though I’m not a big Hitchcock fan. Have been watching horse racing most afternoons, plus my dvd of the Victorian Kitchen Garden. Oh those simple innocent days – they’d never have been allowed to get away with a simple square bed design nowadays.
Also trying to work out how to continue to truncated Greek Key motif over the rest of the raised beds at the allotment when the remaining space cries out for triangles.
As to the sock drawer, it will need a serious sort out, as I can only wear one at a time.
Never mind, over half way now, and next weekend I’m being taken to Burford Garden Centre.
In my previous life I spent my days in an office full of landscape architects…lovely people almost to a (wo)man but from lively laughing people they often turned into jargon-expounding dullards. I had a theory then and a strong feeling still that much of that is down to the awards themselves…they seem to revel in and reward the use of tedious language and for soem reason landscape architects set an vast amount of store by those awards and therefore engage in the rewarded language. And we all know all you need to be a landscape archtitect is a *crazy* way of writing A and E in your design lettering. There Ive said it.
Quite frankly you should have alighted at Tring and visited the deceased animals. It is now “The Natural History Museum of Tring” and has a very educational video on how to stuff a mouse.
Stuffing a mouse is considerably more difficult than stuffing an ox.
You need smaller fingers.
What a lot of effort for such small reward – apart from the company of course. There should be a psychological study made, to see what it is that turns nice people with a vision into corporatespeak clones.
It was quite odd. I thought that, at the very least, they could show us pretty pictures rather than distant maps.
There was jaunty music.
I was once on a train that arrived 18 hours late.
Two and a half of those were spent backing up, and the rest parked in Schreiber (pop 900) in northern Ontario.
We were allowed off for a walk, but it was a -30 January day and the town’s dogs, mostly of the husky persuasion, howled like wolves (which many probably were in part) until we were back on the train.
The town’s major attraction is a railway museum.
I think near Carlisle. The lights failed and we were given those little glow stick things that you sometimes see at raves.
Six hours. One hundred yards from Oxford station. It wasn’t even electrified then. Oh, you mean it still isn’t?
Awards of all sorts should be banned. Everything evil occurs. There is usually Powerpoint. There zingy music repeated as each winner arrives. Then two unattractive people are photographed shaking hands over a piece of plastic.
Yes. There is a difference between poetry and romance – as there is between romance and romantic.
I hope the stuffed animals are still there. When I visited it was a wonderful place – where I realised how tall tall extinct birds were and was fascinated by the drawers full of impaled butterflies.
The nature of the Lovely Howard’s work means that he gets nominated for awards most years. These days it’s the campaigning side of print media rather than corporate, so they are modest affairs, but in the dark days when he worked on the dark, i.e. corporate side of things, he ended up on the same table as the paid host for the night – the one and only comedy Saint Barry Cryer.
What did you think of Borde Hill? The last two times I went I thought it was a bit of dump to be honest.. badly in need of a makeover. Lazy Trollop agreed so we can’t both be wrong. Nice cafe though which we all know makes up for a lot.
At least your beard/moustache didn’t turn out ginger like Mark D’s and Joe’s.