I feel like writing to The Times. It’s one of those occasions when a hastily penned missive to The Thunderer (in the Old Days before it was bought by the Dirty Digger) seems appropriate.
I’ve long missed the first cuckoo of spring – even if I could actually identify the bird, let alone the song; outraged howls of rage about the increase in council charges would have been lost in the chorus of aged persons demanding preferential treatment; and as a life long European (in spite of an occasion in university when I was prevailed upon by an importunate friend to help distribute anti-Europeans leaflets – on the strict understanding that I was allowed to distance myself from the information if I actually met anyone while posting the leaflets through letter boxes) I spurn to inveigh against the latest piece of Eurocratic nonsense for any one of the floating centres of disinformation in Europe.
Just as a matter of interest: did you actually manage to follow that last sentence all the way through to the end? I’ve just counted up and there are about 120 words in it. And lots of punctuation. There is a reason why we don’t have sentences like this any more; or at least we shouldn’t have sentences like this any more! I put it down to reading
Vladimir Nabokov. He is one writer who really does deserve the adjective ‘lapidary’ when applied to his writing!
Anyway: writing to The Times - why? It is to mark one of those changes in the year when you can say ‘This is a significant moment.’ And like the (for me unidentifiable) sound of the first cuckoo or the shy thrusting of a crocus towards the weak smudge of misty light, it is something which indicates to we light starved northerners that hope, in the guise of greater luminescence is becoming more than a rapidly fading folk memory.
As a gadget sort of person the garden did not furnish many opportunities (in the bad old days) for wonton expenditure on conspicuous electronic excess. When I was young the most exciting thing that a garden held (in my young experience) was a bird bath. Gardens were for growing things. Things that took a long time to appear and then died. The gadgets of those days were mundane things like shovels, trowels, dibbers and lawn mowers and unspellable things like secateurs. Electronics were there none.
But the birdbath of yesteryear has been gloriously superseded by something which used to be the preserve only of the very rich. The working water feature. When I was young the only fountains that I knew of were municipal and sherbet. Private individuals who owned fountains also owned swathes of countryside and/or Mayfair. Now the garden without a working water feature is obviously trying to make a post modernist counter culture statement. Now it is almost a way of asserting a sort of inverted snobbery of ostentatious individuality. And that’s not just because I have four!
Nowadays a garden can be a seamless extension of the house with numerous pieces of furniture, cooking facilities, piped music, central heating, sporting facilities, water on tap, different ‘rooms’, aroma therapy and pretty flowers. With all these attractions the garden is sometimes preferable to the house!
But one of the first ways in which a small urban garden could partake of some of the élan of the good and the great was in terms of lighting. One reads of the parties in the past when servants would have been charged with hanging the trees with Chinese lanterns with real candles inside them, or placing torches of real fire at regular intervals, or lanterns. All labour intensive and only the prerogative of the rich and idle.
But, with the advent of low cost low voltage lighting every small scrap of semi-detached verdure was suddenly transformed into a wonderland of dim light!
Obviously the practicalities of actually getting the low voltage to the lights from the high voltage mains supply of the house was a tickly problem which often results not in a gleam of light but the glow of conflagration or, alternatively, the complete darkness which comes with the lighting system of the house being shorted by the lack of professionalism of the person who had relied on a comforting memory of confident, competent, friendly Barry Bucknell! The same Barry Bucknell who in his ‘Do-It-Yourself’ series on BBC in the 50’s had talked a generation of house owners to destroy their period features in a bland landscape of hardboard.
So ‘lighting’ was the new black’ for gardening. Then, when the plucky pioneers had achieved the almost unbelievable by getting their garden lit (well, ‘gloomed’) with their low voltage mains connected lighting, suddenly a ‘Tomorrow’s World’ bombshell:
solar lighting!
Lighting (of, it must be admitted even less power than the original low voltage type) was available to everyone with no need to court death by tampering with the mains.
And this is where; finally, I get back to my starting point. Almost. Throughout the year during the long dark evenings and nights there is sometimes a strange occurrence. You are sitting in your living room, the windows blank and dark, then suddenly an intermittent gleam of light as if you had a peeping tom crouching in the garden and sending you an incoherent Morse message. This is, of course, your solar light which, having had an unexpected hour or so of unseasonable light has charged enough of the battery to blink and splutter before it sinks back into its dark sleep until the climate in this god forsaken country attempts to get its act together again.
So, I officially announce that something like Convincing Spring has arrived because my solar lights have come on for three nights in succession for longer than two hours!
Can summer be far behind?
[Rhetorical.]
Just as a matter of interest: did you actually manage to follow that last sentence all the way through to the end? I’ve just counted up and there are about 120 words in it. And lots of punctuation. There is a reason why we don’t have sentences like this any more; or at least we shouldn’t have sentences like this any more! I put it down to reading
Vladimir Nabokov. He is one writer who really does deserve the adjective ‘lapidary’ when applied to his writing!Anyway: writing to The Times - why? It is to mark one of those changes in the year when you can say ‘This is a significant moment.’ And like the (for me unidentifiable) sound of the first cuckoo or the shy thrusting of a crocus towards the weak smudge of misty light, it is something which indicates to we light starved northerners that hope, in the guise of greater luminescence is becoming more than a rapidly fading folk memory.
As a gadget sort of person the garden did not furnish many opportunities (in the bad old days) for wonton expenditure on conspicuous electronic excess. When I was young the most exciting thing that a garden held (in my young experience) was a bird bath. Gardens were for growing things. Things that took a long time to appear and then died. The gadgets of those days were mundane things like shovels, trowels, dibbers and lawn mowers and unspellable things like secateurs. Electronics were there none.
But the birdbath of yesteryear has been gloriously superseded by something which used to be the preserve only of the very rich. The working water feature. When I was young the only fountains that I knew of were municipal and sherbet. Private individuals who owned fountains also owned swathes of countryside and/or Mayfair. Now the garden without a working water feature is obviously trying to make a post modernist counter culture statement. Now it is almost a way of asserting a sort of inverted snobbery of ostentatious individuality. And that’s not just because I have four!Nowadays a garden can be a seamless extension of the house with numerous pieces of furniture, cooking facilities, piped music, central heating, sporting facilities, water on tap, different ‘rooms’, aroma therapy and pretty flowers. With all these attractions the garden is sometimes preferable to the house!
But one of the first ways in which a small urban garden could partake of some of the élan of the good and the great was in terms of lighting. One reads of the parties in the past when servants would have been charged with hanging the trees with Chinese lanterns with real candles inside them, or placing torches of real fire at regular intervals, or lanterns. All labour intensive and only the prerogative of the rich and idle.
But, with the advent of low cost low voltage lighting every small scrap of semi-detached verdure was suddenly transformed into a wonderland of dim light!Obviously the practicalities of actually getting the low voltage to the lights from the high voltage mains supply of the house was a tickly problem which often results not in a gleam of light but the glow of conflagration or, alternatively, the complete darkness which comes with the lighting system of the house being shorted by the lack of professionalism of the person who had relied on a comforting memory of confident, competent, friendly Barry Bucknell! The same Barry Bucknell who in his ‘Do-It-Yourself’ series on BBC in the 50’s had talked a generation of house owners to destroy their period features in a bland landscape of hardboard.
So ‘lighting’ was the new black’ for gardening. Then, when the plucky pioneers had achieved the almost unbelievable by getting their garden lit (well, ‘gloomed’) with their low voltage mains connected lighting, suddenly a ‘Tomorrow’s World’ bombshell:
solar lighting!Lighting (of, it must be admitted even less power than the original low voltage type) was available to everyone with no need to court death by tampering with the mains.
And this is where; finally, I get back to my starting point. Almost. Throughout the year during the long dark evenings and nights there is sometimes a strange occurrence. You are sitting in your living room, the windows blank and dark, then suddenly an intermittent gleam of light as if you had a peeping tom crouching in the garden and sending you an incoherent Morse message. This is, of course, your solar light which, having had an unexpected hour or so of unseasonable light has charged enough of the battery to blink and splutter before it sinks back into its dark sleep until the climate in this god forsaken country attempts to get its act together again.
So, I officially announce that something like Convincing Spring has arrived because my solar lights have come on for three nights in succession for longer than two hours!
Can summer be far behind?
[Rhetorical.]
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