Fireweed
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Interesting happened! I think it was good. Huge thanks for coming. We’ll do it again next year. Watch this space.
All five things this month are from The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing. A lot of it went over my head. I don’t know much about plants and gardening, so there were long lists of things that I skipped. But some of it struck deep.
Like this bit about the recent times:
“My abiding sense of the past five years was of waking in the dark to check election results on my phone. First there was Brexit, and with it the global rise of the far right. Then Trump was elected president, and every single day more cherished assumptions were crushed into the ground. Concepts like democracy, virtue, truth, liberalism became the punchline of Twitter jokes, then the subject of attacks in newspapers and by MPs. I stopped being able to write or even speak sometimes. Everything I wanted to say sounded exactly like the sort of thing a person like me would say, a stupid liberal, still entranced by dead ideas. It was like the hollowing out of a loved body, head and heart held up bleeding to a laughing crowd.”
And this little description of a party:
“Mark’s Twelfth Night parties, supper tables laid in every room, the gas lamps burning, hundreds of candles, a woman in a dress made riskily of feathers.”
And this bit about William Morris:
“In William Morris’s News from Nowhere, meanwhile, gardens running with flowers are one of the many delights encountered by the time-travelling narrator William Guest, who goes to sleep in Victorian England and wakes in a twenty-first century totally reconfigured after a socialist revolution. Throughout his journey, Guest is astounded to find himself in familiar regions of London that have undergone a deliciously floral transformation, so that Kensington is a forest, Trafalgar Square an orchard of apricot trees and Endell Street is filled with roses. In fact, the dominant image of this new society, if the word dominant can be used for such a gentle civilisation, is that of a garden, ‘where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt.’”
In fact, Morris is my new fashion inspo:
“Morris dressed like an elegant tramp in rumpled corduroy, with a dandyish red kerchief knotted around his neck, a pipe-smoking caricature of what he was: a socialist baronet.”
And I’m fascinated by how London’s botany was transformed by the Blitz and bomb sites:
“After the Great Fire, it was London rocket that had grown most abundantly among the ruins, but after the Blitz its place was taken by the glowing pink spires of rosebay willowherb, known as fireweed for its ability to flourish on burned ground. It spreads by means of its prodigious seeds, eighty thousand in a season, and its presence brought an abundance of elephant hawk-moths to float, pink too, in the dusk above the ruins. There were gaudy drifts of Atlas poppy, which looks as if it’s made from rags of fine orange silk, as well as coltsfoot, gallant soldiers, Canadian fleabane and the pyrophile Oxford ragwort, which grows in volcanic ash in its native Sicily, and can likewise take advantage of the sites of recent fires. Most of these arrivals were wind-borne, but some seeds were brought by birds, or on people’s boots, while the tomato plants that flourished in sunny places were thought to have derived from office workers’ lunches. Aliens, adventives, provincials, invaders, pioneer colonists and accidental waifs: the language used by botanists of the time was not exactly neutral.”
PROMOTIONAL NEWS
With Interesting out of the way I’m back on the bedroom producer tip. And somehow I’ve managed to produce something I actually like. It doesn’t follow any of the rules I’ve been trying to learn about mixing and mastering and it’s full of random samples from TikTok but I might even enjoy listening to this. I hope you do too: Infusing Your Coffee With Intention and Purpose.
Also, if you happen to be passing All My Friends on Wednesday evening I’m hoping to try my hand in the Open Decks. Come and hear me be bad at beat matching.
AND on Saturday evening it seems that I’m going to be doing a turn at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, as part of Nerd Night. I’m not sure of many of the details to be honest. But you can buy tickets.
I'll give you back your day.
russell
(There are 998 of you. Luxembourg has an area of 998 square miles)