Idea IS the format

Some bricks.

Idea IS the format afficianados (of which there are about three, including me) will recall a golden age, back in 2007, when all I really blogged about was our garden.  That, and periodically talking shit about marketing. (And then, for some inexplicable reason, writing it down.)

My first shed.

I even made a few short films, comprising the Hackney Garden series; an occasional digest I hope to resurrect this summer, if only to inflict some more rambling and ill-informed commentary through the uniquely unflattering prism of video.

Some other bricks.

The upside of my documentary efforts is that you can still revisit the grim patch of grassy wasteland we inherited back in March 2007.  And that’s not the kind of wasteland you snare stray dogs on.  I’m talking about the kind of barren moral and metaphysical wilderness unto which the Lord’s own progeny condemned himself in the act of washing away the sins of all mankind. Somewhere you could drop in on tomorrow and end up kicking your heels with the still-twitching corpse of T.S. Eliot, while Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek stole your car and burned your house down.

The late T.S. Eliot. And some bricks

Indeed, a quick look back through the leafy annals bears pictorial testimony to so many long weekends spent digging up bricks, more bricks, some other bricks, and some carrier bags, containing Polish workmen’s faeces.

We don’t really talk about the faeces so much any more; the memory has been all but expunged, even if the distinctive aroma of immaculately preserved Eastern European excrement lingers on.

I’ve often reflected on the fact that these rugged and regular contractors, even in the very act of installing working water-closets into our newly re-developed domecile, must have bagged, tagged and buried their feculence knowing that the kind of person stupid enough to try and transform this barren backyard into their own arboreal Xanadu would also surely be the kind of person who deserves to end up prostrate on their hands and knees clawing their fingers through somebody else’s shit.  How right they were.

Some of these men are of Polish descent, but none of them have ever shat in a carrier bag and buried it in our garden. I think.

Then, at some point – I don’t recall exactly when – I actually started to do some gardening.  I mean real gardening, involving growing things that are green, and maybe even eating them, and the fact that they have been grown in shit not necessarily being a bad thing, but sometimes even a good thing, to the extent that I would actually go out and buy new shit, the more expensive the better, to help them grow.

Our vegetable patch (2008), covered in sticks and netting and shit designed to make cats stay the fuck out of it.

The reality, as I’ve discovered first hand, is that gardening is mostly about shit.

Not just shit-shit.  I mean all that other shit, the shit you go and buy at B&Q, once you realise the privately owned garden centre up the road has a price point that would loosen Prince Charles’ own pre-eminent rectum.  Shit with handles, and metal bits, and plastic attachments that cost more than the thing you’re subsequently unable to attach them to.

Then there’s all the shit you have to somehow get rid of.  Not shit-shit, that would be easy, you could just chuck it down the khasi.  I’m talking about the shit you can’t flush, or burn, or leave in a bin-bag out front, because if you do the bin-men won’t take it – or anything else – for the next six months.  The shit you end up carting all the way to the dump by the bucketload, in order to have it disposed of by trained professionals, men who know their shit from their shit, and have the coolest fucking stack system you’ve ever seen.

Which is why, when you look at the photo below, and I tell you that I spent this weekend digging out that new bed at the front, and planted two drills of peas in it, along with all the different varieties of lettuce, spinach, cabbage and broccoli I’ve got growing up the back there, you’ll probably think ‘meh, sure, fine, that’s all well and good, but it looks, well, kinda… shit.’

And you’re right.  But it’s my shit.  And one day my shit’s going to come out smelling of roses.

(Sorry? What’s that? You want more bricks? Oh go on then.)

I was due to spend this weekend in Southend on my brother-in-law’s stag weekend. Instead, after a 72-hour round trip to LA for the Virtual Worlds Expo, I decided to spend the time at home with family pottering around in the garden. Sitting here on Sunday night, feeling nourished and well-rested on the brink a hugely important working week, it feels like the right decision.

Lola and I were down at B&Q by about half nine on Saturday, and spent a happy half hour trolleying around picking up this, that and the other, including this odd little impulse purchase:

Food’s a bit thin on the ground for birds at this time of year, so it seems like a good time to do a bit to help. We have a nice view of the box from within the kitchen as well, so hopefully Lola will enjoy keeping an eye out for any regular visitors.

From the picture below you can see that the kitchen garden is now clear, except for some spinach still going strong in the far left and four French raspberry plants over on the right gifted us by my mum and dad. (They went away with a banana plant that’s apparently thriving in St Vaast La Houge in a way that it never really looked like doing in Hackney.)

I also put a fresh bag of chipped bark down just to cover up a couple of spots where it was looking a little patchy, and I planted those three lovely looking plants in that bed over on the right. Two of them are spotted laurels, ‘an extremely robust, variegated shrub’, and in the middle there’s an evergreen azalea, ‘a small, hardy evergreen shrub producing salmon-coloured flowers’.

I have no idea what the garden’s going to end up looking like, or how long we’re going to be around to enjoy it, but I do enjoy the time I spend pottering around out there, especially when Lola comes and joins me, giving me the excuse to witter on endlessly about what it is I’m doing at any given moment.

When I finally sat down to deal with some of the work I have to do in preparation for next week, I started by drawing up a things-to-do list, most of which related to business we have to win. In my own mind I had a couple of other things to do as well, one of which was to write up a post about my LA trip, and another of which was to post these photos. Plus I had a backlog of articles and links people had sent me that needed following up.

The conceptual model I initially created for these tasks was one based on mutual exclusion – if I was reading the articles, I wasn’t preparing a pitch document, or working on a blog post, and vice versa.

Inherent within this was a fairly rigid chronology – I would do one thing, then another, then another. That said, even though I was trying to itemise and prioritise, the to-do list as a whole was now looming over me, a single insurmountable obstacle.

I contemplated abandoning these efforts entirely. Fortunately, rather than doing so, at this point it registered that this methodology for managing my time and effort really sucked, and that I ought to try and improve on it.

I tried to look at the things I needed to do in terms of the core processes they incorporated – what I’m referring to as ‘indivisible processes’. I could see that all the pitch documents would be driven by the same essential argument, even though this would subsequently be structured in a different way. A cursory look through the links and articles revealed that these would inform this argument. It also occurred to me that the LA blog post would sit most naturally off the back of all of this, albeit that I would be forced to publish it later than I might have liked.

Eventually I had a far more holistic model of my ‘workload’ in mind. Other things began to happen. I started to form a much clearer sense of priority, weighing the primary and secondary value of individual acts against their capacity to deliver the various necessary outcomes.

I also abandoned the model of mutual exclusivity, unless it was the nature of a particular task that it need to be approached in complete isolation.

I detached myself from my computer, and started to work on paper. This is something I’ve been building up to for a while. I’m starting to see how limited and labour-intensive computers are as a way of completing complex tasks, and am starting to use mine on a far more task-specific basis.

Though I have very little to show for it, I’m certain that the hour that followed was by far the most productive I’ve spent at my desk in some time. My dissastisfaction with the the things-to-do model has been growing, and I can see that this alternate approach has the potential to be massively liberating, far more enjoyable, and much more consistent with the nature of the tools, media and ideas that form the basis of my working life.

With all of this in mind, I made a first pass at re-envisaging my life in terms of indivisible processes. It brought me here, to the end of this post, in which I’ve given those dearest to me the chance to catch up with what I think they’re most interested in hearing about, and I’ve taken a first step in arranging my evening’s revelations into a form that can be shared and expanded upon.

As a final aside, I’m completely convinced that I wouldn’t have reached this interesting place if I hadn’t permitted myself a two hour nap earlier on today, at a point at which I was struggling to concentrate on anything. Indeed, now that I think about it, sleep is perhaps the ultimate indivisible process – it has no output within itself (except, in my case, sound waves), but it is the foundation of everything we do in life, and influences our productivity and effectiveness very directly. With that in mind, and an exciting week ahead of me, I bid you goodnight x

These two photos ought to tell the story of a pretty perfect Saturday. An afternoon at the Natural History Museum…

…followed by an evening in the garden preparing lovely fresh mackerel, barbecued and served up with some of that pak choi you can see growing in the background, seasoned thai-style and wok-fried by the infinitely versatile Mrs Light.

I love days like these, full of things that come naturally. I hope I can raise my kids to appreciate them as much as I do, and I hope they have the opportunity.

These are just some of the lovely flavoursome beauties I plucked from my patch last night, mixed up into a wonderful salad along with thinning from five varieties of lettuce and served within thirty minutes of leaving the ground.

Cracking episode of Hackney Garden on the way, showing the extent of my kitchen garden goodness, just as soon as I manage to find one of the several hundred firewire cables currently hidden around our home.

The kitchen garden’s pretty much planted. Over on the left there I’ve got four rows of spinach, eighteen sprouting broccoli plants (rescued from B&Q’s bargain bin for the princely sum of 50p) and three rows of Swiss chard. Next along is a few rows of carrots at the back, and some beetroot at the front. The big middle berth has now fewer than five varieties of lettuce at the back behind three rows of onions, then further along we’ve got radishes, pak choi and spring onions.

I’ve used an assortment of garden netting and permeable mesh to provide the necessary protection while the seeds germinate. Between that, a healthy sprinkling of chilli powder and a load of bamboo canes poking out of the ground I can hopefully persuade the local cats to go shit on somebody else’s parade. If not, I’m going to get me an air rifle and spend the whole of next weekend camped up in the bedroom with a hip flask and half a dozen scotch eggs, in the hope that I can plant a couple of warning shots on the backside of anything foolish enough to fuck with my greens.

Last year what did for me wasn’t feline – it was the sycamore overhead and that nasty looking stuff you can see growing over the other side of the wall. It took a matter of weeks for last year’s patch to be overrun, so I’m very conscious that I need to get out there once a week and weed, come wind, rain or shine. I’m also told the sycamore is due to come down pretty soon, and I might hop over the wall and deal with that other stuff myself. If it gets away from me this year I don’t think my dear old dad will ever let me forget it.

Big thanks to Canadian Mike, who came over on Saturday and gave me some very timely tips, along with a fair bit of graft – I was happy to be able to offer him the pick of a pretty tasty barbie we rolled out on Saturday night. A shout must also go out to Gordon and Matt, the copywriters, for encouraging me to keep my multimedia gardening experience on air. And congratulations to Carlos – a fellow vegeculturalist – for whom nature’s bounty has just extended to a second sprog.

It’s been a little while but Dad and I made it back out into the garden today. The area we’re planning to use for the kitchen garden down at the end has now been dug over to a depth of about two feet. The pile of bricks and rubble over on the right-hand side is just part of what’s come out of there since I first broke ground over in the far left-hand corner about a year ago.

The compost bin is starting to fill up with a mixture of kitchen and garden waste, and now plays host to some lovely red worms. The bark chippings have settled down nicely, and the way is clear for the introduction of a shed.

You can see from the photo that the kitchen garden still needs to be levelled, and we need to introduce a shitload of compost to replace the four or five cubic metres of rubble we’ve excavated. Once that’s in it will be time to start thinking about this year’s crops. I’m thinking lettuces, spring onions and radishes, for starters, so that the least we get out of it is some lovely fresh salads.

Anyone got any other suggestions?

Oh, and by the way, I cleaned up these pictures using Adobe Photoshop Express, a free web-based service featuring some quite advanced photo-editing and sharing functionality. All very nicely put together. I’ll be using it again for sure.

Note that I’ve added a little theme tune for this series, courtesy of none other than Mr Rolf Harris. Also, more experiments in subtitling. Not sure how soon I’ll be back in the garden as of Ruby Tuesday, but dad’s up on monday so I daresay we’ll manage something.

Shot and cut this today. It’s hardly Gardener’s World, but it’s nice to have a record of the starting point for project Hackney Garden.

I had particular fun with the subtitling. Started by downloading some freeware called DivXLand Media Subtitler, then I had to go off in search of a couple of codecs to give me the finished product. I can see myself having some fun with the subtitling from here on in, but for now this is probably (hopefully) the clumsiest and most humourless installment in this growing series.

This was all shot on Boxing Day, as the title suggests. It’s a bit flabby, the sound isn’t great, and I’m not sure how much interest there will be in submerged walls and Pyrus Katsura, but I like the idea of documenting the work we’re doing on the garden in this way. It’s giving me some nice material to play around with in Movie Maker, and making me more comfortable operating a camera.

That’s not me in the cover image by the way. That’s my Dad. He always has at least one ‘project’ on the go, typically involving boats or gardens. One day I daresay he’ll try and combine the two into some sort of boat-garden. Rest assured reader, when he does, I’ll be there, and the camera will be rolling.

UPDATE:

Googled ‘boat garden’ and found this.

I LOVE the internet.