Long a fan of finding new voices and the younger voices from genre I care for ( New Country, Folk etc)_and since discovering Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett and John Prine and Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss in new country so called, I find Eliza Carthy, Teddy Thompson, Martha Wainright, Thea Gilmore......and more.... I realise the Circle Will Be Unbroken, time passes and there are newer voices. This I find deeply reassuring as there have been times in music when one has believed the guitar based singer songwriter was dying away, Not so! These two are nothing less than a wonderment in their chosen musics.........notable here for them sitting in on a festival for World Musics showing the new attitude of all accepting diverse and varied sounds from around God's Golfball!

For a Sunday morning this is a beauty! If you haven't heard of them download it now. Enjoy!

  Tim O'Brien and Kelly Joe Phelps 

-  World Music Festival, Chico, CA 1998

Tim & Kelly - Chico 1998 Disc One

Kelly Joe Phelps

Tim & Kelly - Chico 1998 Disc Two

 Steve Earle: "Kelly Joe Phelps plays, sings, and writes the blues. HOLD UP before you lock that in - forget about songs in a twelve bar three chord progression with a two line repeat and answer rhyme structure - though he can certainly do that when he wants to. I'm talking about a feeling, a smoky, lonesome, painful - yet somehow comforting groove that lets you know that you are not alone - even when you're blue. Play on brother."

Bill Frisell: "I first became aware of Kelly Joe Phelps when my daughter (who was 9 or 10 at the time) brought home a cd ('Lead Me On') from the Vancouver Folk Festival. "You might like this, Dad" she said. Boy was she right. I've heard Kelly Joe mention that he's been inspired by people like Roscoe Holcomb, Robert Pete Williams, Dock Boggs, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and others. He seems to have absorbed all this (and all kinds of other stuff as well) and come back with something all his own. Sounds like he's coming from the inside out. The bottom up. He's not just playing 'AT' the music or trying to recreate or imitate something that's happened in the past. He seems to have tapped into the artery somehow. There's a lot going on in between and behind the notes. Mystery. He's been an inspiration to me."

Tim O'Brien: "When I heard Kelly Joe the first time, I was amazed how it all made so much sense. His music is a wide world with three hundred and sixty degrees of influence.... Kelly Joe is a musical slight of hand master. He pulls world wide sounds out of his guitar."

Tim O'Brien
"I wanted to do the whole spectrum of folk music from one guy singing and playing guitar or fiddle to a full band with electric guitar," O'Brien said. And that's how the pair (of albums) came out, like folk music bookends. Fiddler's Green tends toward the intimate and traditional, while Cornbread Nation is a bit funkier and tempo-driven. On both, however, old-time tunes sit comfortably next to originals and a few classic country songs by the likes of Jimmie Rodgers and Harlan Howard. "I could have taken all traditional songs, but I love stuff like 'California Blues' and 'Busted,' which are like folk songs to me, and they fit with the others, and it shows that what is called country music is just another footstep down the same path. Rock and roll, a lot of that is the same too."

weblinks-
Kelly Joe
Tim O'Brien

I am really enjoying sharing these boots with folk and in the past coupla days 'til this morning have loaded some of my favourites from Ry Cooder and started my Dylan page...................both artists seminal influences and remain as important as when I first heard them........

Enjoy!

That's it! Over n out........

GRAMMY 2011 HIGHLIGHTS

Amongst the Grammy Awards for 2011 The Doors - DVD When You're Strange from Rhino Records (we love RHINO!)

Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger 

seem to have put the youngsters to shame this evening by blowing everyone away with their performances available from Big O

BUT

Also available here if your passing! (But nobody reads it Ed?)  

Macca, His Bobness & Mick @ The Grammys 2011

*Note includes Paul singing Birthday for Ringo! (sic?!)

That's wins for Jeff Beck, Alex Chilton's 'Big Star'  for liner notes (sic!) and THE DOORS for a great DVD music video for When You're Strange! Get 'em here!

Rhino - When You're Strange

Things we have learned this weekend........

It’s a funny ole world isn’t it? What IS it like to find one a citizen of this planet at the start of February 2011? 

What have we learned this weekend…..?

In the news this weekend we have learned that today is International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation, that we live in a world where this being a necessary requirement is amongst the most depressing information any human being can receive but perhaps that’s just me. 

That one of my favourite comedians Steve ‘Alan Partridge’ Coogan has been given a whole page to chastise 3 small minded idiots who star on some TV show about cars after coming out with foul idiotic racist comments about Mexicans. 

That a 14 year old girl has been whipped to death in Bangladesh, that we the Brits known world wide as a nation of animal lovers, are concerned that there is an increase in race horses are being sold off for meat products after their useful (sic) racing life is over. 

That the Mubarek family appears to be worth some £70 billion….that’s £70 BILLION!

We have also learnt that there is yet another awarding architect celebrating some diabolical “carbuncle” on the face of Margate as it’s Turner Museum has its opening. Now I cannot do much about Mubarek and the plight of the Egyptian people, I can only sympathise with Sister Fa as yet again she has to bring to our attention the plight of millions of women who have suffered the torture of female circumcision but that by keeping the message 'on song' that men may be influenced to gradually begin to accept that this form of mutilation is unacceptable and that with these strenuous efforts the rate in many African countries is falling for example in Ethiopia, the prevalence rate has fallen “from 80% to 74%, in Kenya from 32% to 27% and in Mubarek’s Egypt the rate has dropped from 97% to 91%”.  Heartening words indeed…….

Most if these issues fill me with a deepest despair that makes one feel as impotent to do anything as it’s possible to feel. But I can have a rant about the buildings that surround us as there is no good reason these panjandrums of the world of architecture foist yet another hideous inappropriate aircraft hanger of a gerbosity on the unsuspecting public.

It is rare I find myself in tune with HRH Prince Charles but we seem to close kindred spirits over architecture.*

The problem is that architects think they are artists. Those I have met are wealthy objectionable and display all the signs of the most immense egos known to man.

They are not artists and yet behave like them whenever the climate dictates they can get away with these monstrous articles littering our country. Indeed I believe that they should be accountable to those of us who have to live with the fruits of their labours (sic - most designs could be forgiven for appearing like they were either designed on a fag packet or actually based upon the fag packet itself.)

Thus showing a complete lack of artistic integrity design, sensibility or the unpopular view that whilst people have to inhabit these spaces they should not be consulted about the design process as they only have to live and work and experience these vast concrete bunker like buildings. Most architects seem to be of the 'Nuremberg Rally School' function over form brigade who might be better off designing gas chambers. A bit strong perhaps but they are able with consummate ease and milllions in their pockets as a result to foist this utter desecration on us innocents like so many proletarian rabble as we cannot understand the ‘art’ that is architectural design and the 9 years training it has to achieve such cheery levels of fascist nonsense.

Take for example the monstrosity that is the new Turner Mausoleum on the Margate seafront "a very secure and wholesome building" according to the ‘master of permanence” David Chipperfield (I was given pause for thought at this name and wondered if he was any relation to the Circus family….)

Just look how it blends in naturally with its surroundings and how the architect has so cleverly taken into account the skyline and the existing local architecture so that it appears to blend in with it’s surroundings almost seamlessly……

From this vantage point what might you assume this building was? A new warehouse storing vital shipbuilding technology? A New TK Maxx superstore? A storage plant for the local sewage service? An Art Museum - I doubt it?

I am given to question architecture and especially that which impinges on my soul and sensitive sensibilities, I spent several years across for the multi-award winning Said Business School in Oxford and was truly incensed to discover this is cited as example’s of fine architectural achievement passed off as centre of excellence in education.

The University school looks like this

This monstrosity has always truck me as being designed over lunch by someone looking at a fag packet rather actually designing something using imagination, artistic sensibilities or moments of inspiration. The tower is referred to frequently as adding a contemporary feel to Oxford’s 'Dreaming Spires' skyline. Not a dream I would have but there you go!

It replaced the ‘listed building’ that was once the old Oxford Rewley Road Station long in disuse but eventually bought and sent to a Railway Museum. It looked like this:

“To be concerned about the way people live; about the environment they inhabit and the kind of community that is created by that environment should surely be one of the prime requirements of a really good architect. It has been most encouraging to see the development of Community Architecture as a natural reaction to the policy of decamping people to new towns and overspill estates where the extended family patterns of support were destroyed and the community life was lost. Now, moreover, we are seeing the gradual expansion of housing cooperatives, particularly in the inner city areas of Liverpool, where the tenants are able to work with an architect of their own who listens to their comments and their ideas and tries to design the kind of environment they want, rather than the kind which tends to be imposed upon them without any degree of choice.

This sort of development, spear-headed as it is by such individuals as a Vice-president of the RIBA, Rod Hackney and Ted Cullinan - a man after my own heart, as he believes strongly that the architect must produce something that is visually beautiful as well as socially useful - offers something very promising in terms of inner city renewal and urban housing, not to mention community garden design.” HRH Prince Charles - 150th Anniversary speech to RIBA

 I hear you ask 'Well Andy, it's all very well moaning but what do you like?'

Less a fan of Cullinan than I am of Rod Hackney and yet here’s a Cullinan project that seem to fit the bill. Yup it IS a modern design……….

These Cullinan projects will do for a start and yes, I do agree with Rod Hackney and his involving the people who actually live in the areas having a say in what their home and buildings should look like

This’ll do………

It is about the effects on people who inhabit these buildings and I truly believe that much of contemporary malaise and depression is caused by the awful building we have to, or are forced to, inhabit

 Neither am I afraid of the 'modern', a stickler for the old traditions, the Georgian and the old fashioned

 This is modern is it not? But it seems to have far more sensitivity to it's surroundings. It has wit and charm and modernism writ all over it seems to me yet does not impinge or shout at us or threaten our well-being and sense of what is......"Beautiful" there I've said it. Beauty!

I grew up believing that the entire planet should be able to live in a Frank Lloyd Wright building and still hold to that. I appreciated Corbusier but he, almost by default, has caused some of the most unworthy architectural disasters known to man. 

The modular system that gave us high rise frighteners and yet if everyone could have lived in a Corbusier maybe we have been OK. Certainly the interest in vernacular architecture is a strong feeling for me and that this is looked down upon by architects comes as no surprise. Scribbling on napkins and designing such hideous “carbuncles” they should be re-trained and have to be given client consultations with, not the commissioner of such hell holes, but the people who inhabit them, seems like democracy and the alternative is fascism.

For this is modular too isn't it?

I am given to like American architecture and especially the vernacular of San Francisco where I worked for art publisher, Pomegranate Inc in Mill Valley I found architecture that I loved and not all of it the homes of the rich in the smaller towns and villages what of urban design I hear you ask well look at this too!

Easy on the eye and on the soul and spirit too! It can be done………

Beauty.....

Modernism...this from just up the road in the Cotswolds

......combined with awareness of its surroundings........

....leads to harmony of design in nature.......

...not lacking in ambition but still at one with those who dwell therein...

art & beauty at peace with its surroundings

achievable whether in Mill Valley, Cumbria or The Cotswolds

that can be subsumed by its surroundings as much as a it can satisfy the dweller therein

 Not impact itself upon the viewer, the human occupant or unwitting drone who has to suffer it's effects

When perhaps these are drawn up

by folks better at symbolising the prisons that most of us urban dwellers find ourselves stuck with 

*

Prince Charles speech to the 150th Anniversary of the RIBA

.....And people wonder why we're in trouble!

I am thinking of starting a Charity (long story) and went round all my local Banks in the village yesterday. Not ONE of them was interested in my setting up a new account for such purposes. Given that the Banks are what got us into the mess, what is going on when you can't give them several thousand pounds to open a small business account?

One said they hadn't got the forms, one said could I set it up by phone (sic!) another said I could do it in town and another said could I go to another branch and ask for 'clubs and societies account forms', the other, Lloyds TSB said, after keeping me waiting for ten minutes while she went to get a "phone number", came back to say that they weren't taking on new customers for "that sort" of account! It's money! Cash! And you are turning it away! EXTRAORDINARY!

I particularly wanted to go in to a local branch and set it up with, you know, A Human but apparently this is not to be....so I was in the position of trying to set up an account which in order to be registered with the Charities Commision has to have some £5,000 in it and whilst some delightful lady was in to transfer £15 to her son's account and people were taking out £25 here and paying in £30 there and some guy came in with a bag full of £1 coins to change whilst I was stood with a £200 deposit and the offer of £5,000 and I was told effectively we don't want "That Sort' at the moment!
Well you know what?
I Don't want THAT SORT of Bank and you just lost several thousand pounds!

Think I'll go on line and do it with the Co-op!
:o(

Here's a treat for a cold grey February morning..........Kassav, a favourite 'Zouk' band of mine

Zouk is all the medicine you need and you will never fall ill!

Turn it up .....and if it doesn't have your toes tapping and/or whirling around your living room ......why, I'll give you your money back!

Kassav - Zouk La Se Sel Medikaman Nou Nis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ0BpzVRQPc

Jacob Desv who wrote it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ajx1jwcgJQ

Well, the holiday season is finally over and normal service is resumed, a sense of trudging back to the drudgery of daily life, wondering what the new year has in store for all of us, recession and double dips, government trying to sell off what forests there are left (even Thatcher knew she dare not) Egypt and the Arab world in upheaval, two men job sharing in Downing Street who I wouldn't trust as far as I could spit, phone hacking, Wikileaks, student riots on the streets of London and I saw this the other day on our carpet - it summed up the state of play, a piece of tiny tinsel glitter on the carpet. It seemed like some comment upon the festive season just passed, if not on the story of Three Wise Men following a star...........this tiny star a little piece of shiny glister in a grey, dull grey oppressive repressive world

The weather meanwhile after the snow finally cleared looked largely like this..........................

That was a few weeks ago...............this morning the view from Coombe towards the Wytham Woods at 8.30am looked like this

A summary commentary on the political climate, dull grey and with a certain sinister sense of foreboding.........here's wishing everyone a healthy prosperous and safe 2011 

"The Wolves Are Running" - J Masefield

John Donne quotes
Inspired to check by a quote on a Van Morrison bootleg (available over in 'Music') I present some of my favourite John Donne  quotes - some were my Dad's favourites too!

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

John Donne

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

 John Donne

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.

John Donne

God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.

John Donne

Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

John Donne

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.

John Donne

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.

John Donne

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

John Donne

John Donne's House - Pyrford, Surrey

DRUGS & DIOGENES

 

J.W Waterhouse 'Diogenes' 1905 . Oil on canvas
    Art Gallery of New South Wales - Sydney, Australia

Now, ….(well, at least that’s a better start than “So….”. Makes a change for your reader. “I haven’t got any readers” Well I know THAT! I was speaking hypothetically. Ed.) I have left the drop-in for the homeless where I was based for the past fours years and am employed somewhat on an ad hoc basis and peripatetically over other such services in the town. From another Drop-in open in the evenings for food, comfort, shelter and succour where we regularly see upwards of 85 local folk a night, no questions asked, to a 62 bed hostel for people moving up a step from the sleeping on the street. Both places book me sessionally which largely has come to mean when no-one else can be bothered to turn up (not quite fair) – when they have a need of a professionally qualified staff member to fill a gap in the duty rosters, is how I should put it perhaps.

This latter place is amazing the staff fantastically committed and the hostel itself astonishing to the uninitiated. There are clearly folk suffering from all sorts of lack of ‘life skills’ not least their domestic ability. There are clearly some suffering from Diogenes Syndrome – the affliction common to the ‘bag-lady’ ubiquitous in our city centres that is the anti-social compulsion to collect detritus suffered by many previously high functioning people in the their late fifties to sixties. Largely considered to be untreatable, this condition makes for rooms that are, what shall say, somewhat in urgent need of a good tidy-up! A hose wouldn’t be amiss either. As a visual guide, one of the clients who I will call Linda, of whom I am very fond (I have known her for years) has a room that consists of a pile of rubbish covering the floor about half a meter high and has recently dismantled her bed completely so that no recognisable evidence remains save for an increase in the size of the pile in the centre of her room. I found her once on ‘room-check’ reclining upon this pile, smoking a roll-up so much like the Queen of Sheba with a friend sitting on another corner of this pile that wouldn’t go amiss on the local town tip, blithely watching the football on a small portable TV perched atop a quivering heap precariously balanced so as to increase the signal reception.

There is an issue in both places, indeed all over town, and that is the use of illegal substances. In the hostel there is such a need to contain and maintain the ‘bums on seats’ (‘bellies on beds?’ Ed.) aspect of the beds being filled with ‘clients’ that a ‘blind eye’ is turned to drug use on site – in theory there is a policy no doubt but largely the function of staff is one of containment, staff acting as glorified janitors. My first session was a back-to-back shift over a weekend of some 26 hours and I found myself having to answer the door to known drug dealers asking if ‘So‘n’so is in and can you go and get him?’ This rankles with me but am being paid to do a job and I scamper off into the building, up three landings and knock on the clients door and, as cheerfully as I can muster, tell them they have a visitor. They then come down and see who it is and go off into the street and after a few minutes come back smiling. To the uninitiated this may appear perfectly reasonable not to say innocent and ‘normal’ but to the trained eye this has been a door-to-door drug service. This means that rather than do any constructive interventional work with the residents and their substance misuse or heaven forfend take any punitive actions for use of illegal substances (if you bar them then you lose the funding for a bed!) then one has had to see a dealer await their customer and effectively sanction a drug deal!

Sad to say, and seriously here, I discover that there are several mentally ill residents, nowhere else for them with their ‘borderline personality disorder’ the post-Thatcherite ‘care in the community’ means that they languish away in such places. Now they are largely on DLA (disability living allowance) that means they are given more weekly money than someone merely on JSA (Jobseekers) and other residents are aware of this. Not least those dealing drugs to make their own ‘raise’ and score their substance of choice. One of the residents is clearly very mentally ill, wandering the halls talking to himself and on occasion with violent outbursts of anger and distress and on the first weekend I had to help when we received a phone call and were asked to tell him his mother had passed away. This man is in his forties I guess and he has a drug habit. The dealers around and about having realised he is a regular source of ready cash, introduced him to the ‘joys’ of injecting this dirty brown water into his veins and the resultant warm and woolly feeling becomes attractive to him. To the extent that when not flush with money he empties the ‘sin bins’ or finds a discarded needle and injects himself with water, somewhat mystified and disappointed when the resultant feeling of pleasure is absent this time. This has been going on for so long now we have need of the opportunity to clean out his room when he has gone back to visit his family and find out about his mother’s funeral arrangements, apart from wrestling with huge piles of dirty clothes on the floor I am given the task of emptying his three drawer chest of drawers, each drawer of which is full of used hypodermics. When I say full, I mean full. They are full to overflowing! Tipping them into so many sharps bins is precarious work requiring concentration, deftness and huge rubber gloves. I have never seen so many needles in all my life.

Now the drop-in where I work evenings has similar problems but this is a wholly different atmosphere. As the clients appreciate the place is providing food and comfort entirely free of statutory service function and restrictions. There are known drug dealers hovering around and some are small time cannabis dealers distributing their wares to make a raise of enough for themselves [all too common, these are not the scary business men with guns who are in it for the money, these are people scrounging their own drug of choice by making their own cut by dwindling the weight of what’s sold to make enough for themselves to smoke themselves into a stupor) One in particular I have had my eye on since I started there last year. I know he is ‘at it’ I just can’t catch him in the act. I regularly check the toilets for evidence of drug use and find glue packets and the ubiquitous Rizla packet tear off to make a ‘roach’ (curled up card board sliver in place of a filter) and cigarette papers screwed and discarded along with remnants of tobacco and little brown dots of cannabis or grass seeds on occasion.

This time however there is an added factor. If you are going to sell cannabis to the drop-in’s clients it might help to recall that some of your customers are mentally ill. This dealer having sold a ‘short’ order (scant and skimpy weight for the money) to one of our regulars, Richard, who has been given to talk intently to inanimate objects on occasion or burst out laughing for no apparent reason, confounds the ‘dealer’ in his nefarious activity when Richard comes to talk to staff only to complain about the dealer’s prices!

Result! 

The Drop-in will bar him for a fortnight …..

and then normal business will be resumed………..
  

~ 

'Night in Town Homeless' 1860  Oscar Rejlander -British Photographer

GARDEN LEAVE - The Disabled Squirrel and the Poisoned Mouse

Firstly I should perhaps point out that I am NOT on ‘garden leave’, the ubiquitous British expression for being sacked. I am merely taking a week off as annual leave before the Drop-in for The Homeless where I have worked for the past three years goes totally to the wall and is shut down. (It's the cuts you know! The homeless don't need ineffective places like this anymore. Under the new regime they can get on their bikes and find jobs and therefore afford somewhere nice like David Cameron's gaffe up the road in Witney) Technically I am now redundant and have been paid off as such. So for the aforementioned period of annual leave I have not had time to plan what to do with it and therefore anticipate spending a goodly portion of this time sitting in my garden [with an umbrella if necessary] and watching the birds and the bees [literally not euphemistically there’s not any level of such action going on my garden THANK YOU!]



But this is an urban garden well OK a suburban garden really but the conurbation of what is laughably called a ‘village’ [PS the biggest in the UK!] is really just a stretch of estate that extends the limit of Oxford city and is separated only by a golf course [this IS the South] Its feels urban – we have had much bigger gardens when living in the city and the current one is about the size of a comfortably large gentleman’s handkerchief

Sitting down the other day to enjoy a latte in the garden, the first thing that caught my eye was a mouse! Fantastic! Wildlife in all its glory you can just hear me thinking! Then the behaviour of said mouse began to concern me. As it ran it was clearly disorientated, occasionally bursting into phases of chasing its own tail. You know like an idiot canine. Sometimes however augmenting its repertoire by flipping straight over onto its back and in moments of respite seemed to have a head tremor worthy of the most afflicted dystonia and MS sufferer [no disrespect intended here…merely that this was distressingly violent head nodding and clearly …..not natural……..do mice get Alzheimer’s? MS? Dystonia? Or Cerebral Palsy? Not being medically qualified to diagnose I leave it to the experts to pass judgement] Suffice to say I have seen similar behaviour before.



When infested with mice in various dwellings [it would be pompous to call them flats or apartments] I have had call to but traps down and then resorted to poison. The first time in Leicester; ‘dead centre’ of England in more ways than one - the place became so infested with mice even the local feral cats of some five generations inbreeding [i.e. the size of small panthers] were too afraid to enter. The second time after moving back to Oxford we rented a property that frankly crack den owners would have been ashamed to be seen in. The mice population here was so virulent when we moved in that I could set seven traps about the ground floor and before I got my feet into bed, I had heard all of them go off!

This bijou little apartment had a hole in the corner of the living room so huge I could get my leg down it. To the hip! This place was so over grown, the slugs could make it easily up to the bedroom window in their hundreds and the hole in the living room meant that upon one occasion I had a shrew run in and straight up my trouser leg. The funniest bit is I am not joking here! Now a mouse will avoid humans at all costs but Shakespeare knew his British Wildlife and a shrew is a different creature entirely and whilst smaller than a mouse has the courage and temperament of a lion or perhaps a wounded Water Buffalo and a shrew will not back down when confronted with 6 foot of 13 stone idiot.



Now this all became highly distressing, as my wife demanded that I be the one releasing said mouse cadavers into the waste disposal system [a dustbin!] and it was getting ludicrous to fill up a dustbin with more wild life than used teabags! I resorted to poison. Not a decision taken lightly you understand and upon waking one morning to watch the effects of the poison on a mouse at the top of the stairs with my one eye open [I was not disposed to open the other for some considerable time] I watched as this creature shuddered and twitched, its body seized by spasm and jolted till I could bear it no longer.



Now I have been on ‘outward bound' courses as we laughingly call it as a youngster and learnt enough of the ways of the natural world to understand that when coming across a rabbit with myxomatosis the best thing to do is to brace the heel of your stalwart walking boot upon its neck and snap its neck. Indeed was almost forced to do so by some hairy arsed Country yeoman type at the age of 13. Here in suburbia we cannot bring ourselves to do such hearty rustic endeavours. We considered our course of action as put said mouse in a box [my good lady wife’s suggestion] and I watched it spin like a pair of tights on the fastest spin cycle in the washing machine.  Until my wife could bear my inactivity no longer, so she took it in its box to the field opposite [we call it a field – it’s another piece of handkerchief sized scrub that might have once been going to have a railway station on it] and she let it go to enjoy its death amongst the tooth and nail of the feral community of cats that congregate over by the railway tracks.



Here he is! (well, I know I can''t vouch for his gender but it helps me to think he's a bloke OK?)

Now today we had a visitor seldom seen in the back garden haven for wildlife we have cultivated [I say we…..that means my good lady wife, I rarely venture out into this wilderness you understand] This visitor was what appeared to my untutored eye to be a young squirrel and he was tempted down the branches of a large shrub, rescued when we moved in from the council planning ‘green areas’ after someone decided it needed way too much upkeep and decided to concrete it all over. This chap was what at first appeared to be a fine figure of a bushy tailed rodent [not indigenous I grant you and a psychotic little bastard at the best of times having muscled out the British Red Squirrel several decades ago. I understand the interloper comes from the Western United States wouldn’t ya know it! So we are still suffering the ‘Over paid, Over sexed and Over here’ debacle we ever did with our American ‘cousins’ – Yankee Go Home, I say!

As we watched in admiration the sheer invention of this little chap, I said to my wife as we gazed upon its wonderment and beauty, that if recent events were anything to go by it probably didn’t know what it was doing in our garden because doubtless it was poisoned or in its final death throes and about to expire at any minute anyway. Just as she had told me to “Shut up!” I noticed it dragging its rear right leg. Great! It doesn’t know what its doing because its disabled probably starving and has hustled its way into my garden because he can suss out the hanging bird feeder and the somewhat nonchalant garden owners look the type who would know what to do with a blunderbuss even if they owned one.

He performed various acrobatic procedures to get at my nuts and I was so impressed I was minded to photograph the little fellah! [See below] and then it occurred to me being disabled couldn’t account for some of his more eccentric behaviour. That is he didn’t seem at all afraid of us. Now we might put this down to callow youth but it suddenly occurs to me that it could be poisoned and the injury to its leg caused by its many and ever increasing psychotic episodes. We decide to shut the patio doors and lock all the windows





By now we definitely need a cup of coffee.











But maybe indoors.......this time

It's jungle out there people.

A jungle, I tells ya!