the green, green weeds of home

I knew when we took over our new allotment that we would have to work hard to tame it, but I had no idea just how virulently those weeds would grow. I cut back some ground elder a few weeks ago, but yesterday, when I cut back the new growth, some of it was nearly three feet long. If elder were suddenly discovered to be edible, it would be hailed as a miracle crop.

Still, we've harvested most of the nettles, which have been added to the compost heap, and the site is now looking vaguely like it did when we adopted it. Our efforts have not just been to maintain the status quo, however. There is now a good, fertile bed with strawberry plants in it and room for more crops; we've reduced the elder to a about half of its previous area; there are large areas under carpet to suppress weeds ready for digging over in the autumn, and we've generally dug or tidied up and removed a lot of general 'stuff' - mainly brick, tile, wood and glass.

A friend from work has helped tremendously, working away in a corner of the plot, revealing from under a pile of debris a brick oven with two mash pans set in the top. This, we presume, was used to prepare food for pigs which were kept on the site at one time. (The plot has only ever been used for livestock, apparently, and never cultivated, which is why there is still so much rubble under the surface.)

We even have an overall plan that's relatively stable, probably because we've learned not to specify many details, which only change, usually several times. We won't be growing much this year (for different reasons, we've been in this position for what seems like several years), but we're managing to concentrate on small areas. The trick is to remain focused on immediate tasks so that we're not over-faced by the sheer scale of the work ahead.

digital art

Yesterday I went to the Harris Museum in Preston, to see the Digital Aesthetic 2 exhibition. It was very good, though the official website doesn't do the exhibition justice.

The most interesting part consisted of three huge (6 metre high) prints of three cities designed by eboy: London, Berlin and New York. Because they're digital, they can be reproduced at any size, but the sheer scale gives the work an enormous power that's missing from smaller versions.

choo-choo!

I'm very lucky with my job. Today I realised almost every boy's fantasy (no, not that one, the other one): I rode in the driver's cab of a railway engine. We were doing some timelapse photography, and the kind people at the Churnet Valley Railway drove a diesel locomotive specially for us all the way from Cheddleton, past Frogall, to the end of the line and back.

Perhaps the experience was wasted on me, because although I enjoyed it, it didn't mean nearly as much to me as it did my colleague, who was thrilled to be allowed to blow the whistle a couple of times.

It was very pleasant, though, travelling through lush greenery in the soft rain. We disturbed a lot of pheasants, who seemed to like perching on the track, as well as a barn owl and a fox.

waylaid

On Saturday, we went to see 'Waylaid' performed by IOU Theatre in Manchester, part of the FutureSonic festival. It was performed in an inflatable dome in Platt Fields Park, and each member of the audience was given a pair of wireless headphones. (For hygiene, we each had to wear a strip of cloth over our heads so that it rested between our ears and the headphones, which looked very odd.)

The whole production was odd, in fact. There was very little dialogue, and little was amenable to literal interpretation. The setting was a snowy waste with a crashed car half-buried in the ice, and the play seemed to take place in an unconscious woman's head. Some of it was hauntingly beautiful, especially the singing and the violin, but parts, mainly the changes between sections and some of the mechanical contraptions were clunking and intrusive.

On the whole, though, it was worth going. We did have plans to go to more in the festival, which had an interesting and varied programme, but never quite made it.

back again

You can cease your fretting - I'm still around, even though I haven't been blogging much. I just haven't felt like it recently, though occasionally I've been tempted to write about some of the more ludicrous aspects of preparing for today's visit to our museum by Princess Anne. That's probably a treasonable offence, though, so I restrained myself.

If you're interested, you can read my post about the event on the blog for museum staff in the West Midlands. It was through that blog that I discovered Museum 2.0, a fascinating exploration of the implications and potential of Web 2.0 for museums. (Well, I think it's fascinating, even if you don't.)