A Garden of Mud and Stone: Part 2

Hi folks. Sorry it's been so long since my last post! Things have got in the way. I'm too busy at work; I've been editing Jude's soon-to-be-published book 'Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law' and working on the garden as well. On top of that, I've had flu (the seasonal variety, not the much-dreaded H5N1!), necessitating three days off work. Returning to work once I began to improve, I then was alarmed to find myself relapsing, quickly becoming even more ill than I was before. I was diagnosed with a bacterial chest infection and instructed to stay off work the rest of the week and "take it easy". I think blogging counts as 'taking it easy' so here goes.

Once I'd explored the garden and ideas had begun to creep like rampant slime moulds through the recesses of my mind (nice simile, eh?), it was obvious that the first job was to clear the crap at the bottom of the garden. The previous occupants had simply used the bottom ten yards or so as a dump, piling it high with hedge clippings, timber offcuts from DIY projects, broken patio furniture, plant pots, tree branches, soil, stones, old bricks and broken concrete. It was a mess. The hawthorn hedge marking the boundary of the garden, where it meets the woods, was buried under this ton of shit, to the point where I didn't think it was even alive.

One of the first things I did was set light to the dry prunings and twiggy rubbish, which formed a barrier some four feet high, across the garden. This was very dry and the flames raced through it in seconds, reducing it in height and saving me a lot of work. I stamped the fire out before it reached the healthy hedges on either side, but had cause to regret the fire, when I discovered that beneath the mountain of rubbish were some perfectly healthy hawthorns, bent horizontal by the weight. Unfortunately, these got scorched and a couple of them never recovered.

There was still a hell of a lot to shift, so I got one of those garden incinerators from B&Q; one of those metal dustbins on legs, with a chimney in the lid. Know the ones? They are an ace way to burn stuff quickly and in a controlled way. For several days, I fed mine with the woody rubbish from the garden. It burned it up as fast as I could throw it in. All the plastic, metal and non-combustible stuff, I bagged up and took to the local tip.




Above: me burning the twigs and rubbish in my incinerator

It took me a couple of weeks altogether but I eventually got it down to bare soil. I lifted up the poor, flattened, scorched hawthorns, staking them until they could stay upright. Only two died as a result of my fire. The rest formed a fine, if leggy, hedge which was just begging for a man with a billhook to get cracking and lay it; a job for the autumn.

It was good to be doing this stuff. Moving into a new house is all very exciting but it's really only when you start getting to grips with the soil and the growing things out there that you begin to feel some sort of bond with the place. This was enhanced by the fact that our garden is so long and at the bottom, you are, quite literally, in the woods. Going down there from the house is like making a little journey to a different place and, when you're down there, you get a sense of being watched, not by neighbours, as might normally be the case, but by the trees, the birds, the unseen creatures out there. By the woods themselves, which I'm sure some of you will understand.

Once I'd cleared the bottom of the garden, I left it to its own processes for some weeks, whilst Jude and I converted the house into our home. When I came back to it, it was well into Autumn. The early November winds were bringing blizzards of brown and yellow leaves down, covering the ground in deep drifts. Sitting at the foot of the garden, the woods suddenly sounded echoey, empty. The air smelled different, now carrying a rich perfume of decay, laced with the exhalations of fungi, as contrasted with the oxygen pumped out by the green trees just weeks before.

I always reckon that you can tell when autumn arives, irrespective of 'official' starting dates, or of the onset of so-called 'autumnal' weather. The real measure of it is when, quite suddenly, over the space of a week or two, the trees, the big trees of the woods, stop breathing out. That change in the air, as their oxygen production shuts down for the winter, is the real herald of autumn.

That change is married to a change in the woodland soil, too. In summer, through into the weeks leading up to Autumn, any rain falling in the woods is quickly sucked up by the thirsty trees and other plants. The soil never really gets saturated, except during freakishly heavy rains. Come autumn however, the trees are going to sleep. They aren't photosynthesising. They are busy pulling all the goodness back out of their leaves, into their branches and trunks and roots, to store and re-use next year, leaving the leaves empty, the green chlorophyll removed, browns and yellows and reds of unwanted pigments and dead cells painting their drying, rustling remains. The trees seal off the join at the base of the leaf stalk, and it eventually drops off, blown by the wind, to fertilise the soil, the tree eventually feeding on itself as it takes up the nutrients released from its own decomposed foliage.

When this process starts, the trees no longer need the water. They no longer take it up and liberate the oxygen from the water molecule, releasing it to sustain our lives and those of all animals. When the rain falls, it sits there in the soil, only a few evergreens staying awake to drink, and to keep watch over their sleeping cousins. The soil becomes wet, a different wetness to that which you normally encounter in summer. That, and the change in the air, are the true signs that Autumn is here.

Most of us who live in urban areas, and many even in rural areas, have lost that connection with the seasons; our ability to smell the onset of Autumn. Not so long ago, almost everyone working out in the woods and fields would have known that smell, those signs, and would have nodded to themselves and checked their store of firewood against the hardships of the months ahead.

Spring is the same. You know Spring is here, not because you have a few warm days, or it's the 21st of bloody March, or because daffodils are out but because, all of a sudden, some time in March, the woodland soils dry out. What has been wet and cold, sticky and dead, becomes, over the space of just a couple of days, merely damp, seemingly warmer and somehow filled with life. It's hard to describe in words but...it's as if something has suddenly sucked up all that standing water from the winter-sodden ground. Which, of course, is what has happened. The big trees have woken from their winter sleep. The sleeping giants have woken thirsty, and they immediately begin to drink up all that rain and snow-melt. The breaking of the buds comes some days after this initial explosion of invisible activity but is, to most people, the first visible sign of life in the trees. For days leading up to that, however, the water being sucked up from the ground by these giants goes rushing up, through their trunks, to swell the buds and unfurl new leaves to the warming, life-giving sun. It even makes a sound that you can hear - the pulse of the living tree!

It's at this time, given a good reading of the signs, that certain trees can be tapped, bled of a little of their sap, which can be boiled down to make syrup (that's how Maple Syrup is made) or fermented into a delicate wine. The sap rises strongly enough to do this only for maybe a week, ten days at most, each year, until the buds break when it slows to a comparative trickle. To draw sap, you have to be able to read the signs. Tree hugger? You may laugh at the notion, but I know things that most people don't. I've rediscovered them, just by making connections, listening, smelling, observing the lives of things around me.

Anyway, where was I? Oh aye. Autumn in the garden. Sorry about the digression, but the woods are such a barometer of the seasons I just had to wander off into a bit of a Jack Hargreaves.

The hedge along the bottom boundary of the garden caught my attention. It was tall; some of the hawthorns were perhaps twenty feet high. But it was also gappy and leggy. Anyone could just walk into the garden through the gaps. What I wanted was a solid, thorny hedge; a living barrier to people, but not to wildlife. But, crucially, I also wanted to be able to get out into the woods whenever I pleased. So I needed a hedge with a gate set into it, Secret Garden style.

Outside the hedge, the slope of the garden flattens off, right at the top of a steep bank, dropping down to a small beck (a stream, to non-Yorkshire folks. Bloody off-comers!). The top of the bank was crowded with a tangled growth of a nondescript shrub, something like an old privet, with straggly roses growing through it. To help the hedge, I had to get rid of that first, so I set to with loppers and bowsaw, burning the still-green offcuts in the incinerator, until the top of the bank was clear, letting lots of light in (or as much as the overhead sycamores, ash, lilac and spruce would allow!).

Many years ago, in the 1970s, a moody teenage Brian used to spend a considerable proportion of his weekends undertaking a variety of practical conservation projects, in the Tong-Cockersdale Country Park, just South of Pudsey. I was a member of the Tong-Cockersdale Volunteers, or TCV. We were based in the old Stables Block of Tong Hall, which was then a public museum owned by Bradford Council (they later sold it off, scandalously, to become a 'Business Park', and the Stables Block became a private home).



The TCV were affiliated to the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, or BTCV (patron; Prince Charles). Indeed, should any BTCV members read this, I and my TCV colleagues were the first people to go and have a look at Hollybush Farm, then derelict, as a potential Northern HQ for the BTCV, who wanted to move out of their tiny place on Copley Road, Doncaster, to somewhere bigger. We were impressed. Our Head Ranger, Bill Shaw (who later became a Green MP, I believe), recommended it to the BTCV and the rest is history.

Anyway, whilst normal teenagers were drinking cider in parks and bus shelters, talking about imaginary girls they'd shagged, and mugging old ladies, I was out in the countryside, learning drystone walling, hedge-laying, fencing and footpath construction. Brilliant stuff, and I'm forever grateful to Bill and the all the rest (see list below) for giving my adolescence such an odd and lasting spin.

What the hedge needed was the application of my rather rusty hedge-laying skills, something I'd only done once since the end of the 70s, when I laid a huge hedge alongside the allotments where I used to have a plot, in Pudsey.

For the uninitiated, hedge-laying involves cutting partway through the basal stem of a healthy hedge tree or shrub, in such a weay that it can be bent over and 'laid', literally. Adjoining stems can be laid in turn, until one is left with a strong, interwoven, stock-proof hedge of horizontal stems, sometimes supported by stakes. It will regrow and is almost infinitely renewable. Look at any old hawthorn hedge and you'll probably be able to see some gnarled old stems at the base which are laid along horizontally, with new growth coming out vertically from them. That's where a hedge was laid, perhaps generations ago. And that's what I chose to do with ours, where many householders would have replaced it with a short-lived fence or just filled the gaps with wire. The old ways are the best. They didn't evolve and last for centuries without good reason, you know.

So I laid the hedge, all the way around the bottom of the garden. I have a small collection of billhooks, the choping tool used for this practice, because I love them; they are an tool which is redolent with history, and can be picked up for a few quid at car boot sales or on ebay. Go back four hundred years and you'd find men using billhooks identical to those in use today (indeed, the mediaeval military bill - a heavy spiked blade on the end of a long pole, was developed from the billhook). And to make it more fascinating, there are myriad regional variations on the blade shape and length, and each manufacturer had their own patterns within those regional styles. Lovely things, billhooks.

So I got to use my billhooks, which was fantastic. To begin though, I used loppers to trim bushy side-growth off the hedge, and to reduce the height of the tallest stems (which also encourages new growth and the production of defensive thorns). This made the laying easier, as some of the larger bushes were pretty big and heavy and, of course, covered in heavy thorns!


Above: this is from a later stage in the garden, but clearly shows the recently laid hedge behind me
I'm right handed, so it was easier for me to lay left to right, using the billhook in my right hand. It took me, all told, a whole weekend to do. A good hedge-layer would have taken half a day, probably!

A garden of mud and stone - part 1

When we moved into our house in May 2004, we didn't do so because of the house, an unremarkable 1930s semi. We did so because of its location, on a quiet, almost semi-rural backstreet, some three miles South of Sheffield city centre, and its situation. The street sits in the S8 postal district, which encompasses Woodseats, Heeley, Meersbrook, Norton Lees, Meadowhead, Norton and Beauchief.

It sits within an easy drive or cycle ride of the Eastern edge of the Peak District, which was important and, even more importantly for us, short of money as we were/are, it was (and remains) one of Sheffield's relatively 'undiscovered' areas, in terms of its housing potential.

Whereas areas like Nether Edge, Hunter's Bar, Walkley and Crookes have been colonised by incomers, looking for good houses in a nice area, well served by amenities and transport options, the S8 districts are only just coming to people's attention in that respect. The housing slump has put a temporary halt to any potential influx of house-buyers but I can see this part of the city becoming one of the main areas of interest once the market picks up again.

Well, I digress: I'm not blogging about the housing slump and the up and coming suburbs of Sheffield. Nope, what I want to say about our house is why we are here; what moved us to buy it in the first place.

We'd sought long and hard for a house we could afford. I, being from Pudsey, had few preconceptions about where I wanted to live in Sheffield. Jude however, had fixed ideas about that matter, wanting a house close to Nether Green, where her last house had been, so as to be close to her son, and also to the people she knew and felt comfortable with, to her area.

But the houses over in Nether Green and nearby suburbs were expensive; too much so for us. We had to look further afield. One day, hard at work in Leeds, I ventured onto an Estate Agent's website to look at houses on the market in Sheffield, and came across this one. It was Monday morning, and the house had just been added to the website. I rang Jude, who showed little interest, it being miles away from where she wanted to live. Well, a 15 minute drive or an hour's walk anyway.

But it was affordable and the description enticingly said "Backs onto woods". That last statement was enough leverage to get Jude interested enough to go and view it. We did so on the Tuesday, negotiating unfamiliar streets and driving past the house twice, before we identified it as the one we wanted to see.

The house was nice enough; a bit small, but enough for two of us and two old cats. We made an offer the very next day. The couple selling were desperate to move, and wanted a quick sale, so accepted our offer of the asking price immediately. What had really swayed us, and particularly Jude, was not just the price, nor the location, nor even the house itself, but its physical situation and what we saw, as we looked beyond the house to what lay behind it.

The house sits, somewhat paradoxically, in a tiny valley, which itself is high on a hill, some 3 miles from, and 350 feet above, the city. No risk of flooding here.

The house sits on a scarp of sandstone lying just a few feet under the soil, on a steep slope which runs down into the little valley. Out at the front, a tiny, paved patio overlooks the street and the long drystone wall opposite, and gives no hint of what lies behind the house.

The valley is bounded by broad ridges on three sides, and itself runs down towards the distant city. This has a peculiar acoustic effect, whereby the traffic noise from the various trunk roads, which run less than a mile away in three directions, barely register here, being deflected by the aforementioned ridges. Conversely, the small valley serves to channel the sounds of the city centre up the hill to us, so that on a Saturday afternoon the roars of the crowd at Bramall Lane reach our ears, and we can hear the clang and boom of distant forges away on the East of the city. But overall, we are in a quiet pocket of the land, something we never anticipated when we moved here.

On an average evening, the ambient noise is dominated by the song of birds, the sound of occasional passing cars on the street outside, neighbour's voices or music from back-garden socialising, and the wind in the trees.

Ah yes, the trees. The trees are probably the real reason we moved here.

Go through the house, and out through the sliding doors at the back, and you emerge onto a flagged patio, some 20 by 25 feet, as big as the entire garden for some houses of this vintage. This, in turn, leads to a couple of steps down onto a timber decked area, 10 feet by 20 feet, bounded on its downhill side by a wooden balustrade.

This is what we saw when we first viewed the house, as we looked out of the patio doors. And, nice though it was, it was what lay beyond that which really fired our imaginations and sold the house to us.

The decking is perched atop heavy poles, some 6 feet above the top end of a steeply sloping garden. A long, steeply sloping garden; altogether, the garden extends over 130 feet from the back wall of the house, being around 22 feet wide along its length.

The bottom of the garden is invisible from the house because, as the Estate Agent's blurb said, it "backs onto woods", to the extent that the trees swallow the garden. In addition, because of the steep slope, the house itself lies level with the canopy of the trees. Even though the woods are just a narrow strip, Ashes Wood, which is an offshoot of the larger Carr Woods (see my blog article about these woods), they are all we can see, at least when the trees are in leaf, as we look out from the back of the house.



The trees consist of numerous sycamores, some of them old and huge, with crazed and shaggy bark, so unlike the smoother bark of their younger cousins, oaks of various vintages, a scattering of silver birches, some giant ashes and venerable willows, and an underclass of hazel, elder, holly alder and hawthorn. Elsewhere in the woods are giant beeches, at the northern extent of their range, and the odd yew.

So, we bought the house. But this blog article ain't about t' bloody 'ouse, it's about t'garden. It were t'garden wot med us buy t'place, and wot really fired up me imagination, as ah stood an' looked arr it that day when wi went t'view t'place.

S'cuse my lapsing into dialect. I'm from Pudsey you know.

The garden, when we first moved in, was barely worthy of the name. The only kempt parts were the fairly new patio and decking: the rest of the garden, the other 100ft or more of it(!), consisted of a coarse grass and weed-strewn slope, with a few remnant shrubs and a clump of rhubarb, defiantly reminding me of long-past cultivation. This slope ran down the hill, past a huge weeping willow, to where an Anderson Shelter still stood, relict of the era of the house's birth at the outbreak of WW2, when it was intended to protect the occupants from German bombs.

The garden continued for perhaps 25 feet beyond the shelter, but this entire expanse was a no-man's land of weeds, rubbish, hedge-clippings, broken plant pots, dead branches and other detritus, so deep and tangled that it was a fight to make a way through/across it all, to reach the true termination of the garden. This was marked by a series of concrete posts, which had once carried a strained wire fence, but were now relegated to the role of boundary markers.

More interestingly, the boundary was also marked by a hawthorn hedge, leggy and gappy, and with most of its semi-mature bushes half buried and bent horizontal by the weight of crap plied against and on top of them. Most were still alive though, green foliage fizzing with life amidst the rot.

Stepping past the struggling hawthorns brought me to the rounded top of a steep bank, where the ground dropped away into what can only be described as a ravine, along the bottom of which, maybe 20 feet below, ran a little beck. On the opposite, even steeper bank, bluebells and ferns carpeted the ground under the trees. That bank rose, 25-30 feet, to meet a ribbon of a footpath contouring along through the woods, the angle above that easing, flattening out, until rising steeply again to meet a high mesh fence, marking the perimeter of playing fields belonging to the University of Sheffield.



Looking at all this, at my new playground, ideas popped to the surface of my mind like bubbles in lemonade, most bursting uselessly, but some floating there, coalescing around three immutable factors:

1. We have no money
2. The garden lies on a steep slope
3. The woods are full of stuff

These three facts are what led the garden to become what it is now. If you're interested in gardens, then revisit the blog and I'll tell the story. I have lots of pictures too, though unfortunately none of the garden as it was before I began to work on it.

It was late August 2004 before I even put a spade in the ground and well into 2005 before I began, in earnest, to form clear ideas in my head, and to begin to translate them into a physical reality.

One of my great personal weaknesses, almost to the point of inability, is concrete, scheduled, detailed planning. I tend to form ideas which become vague plans or intentions, and which I often begin work on without benefit of timescales or precise details. They develop organically, evolving and mutating as they go, depending on what problems may arise or whether my often unpredictable materials behave as I originally envisaged. My initial 'plans' were:-

1. Clear the rubbish from the bottom of the garden, burning the woody stuff and binning everything else, unless I saw a use for it.
   
2. Rescue the hawthorn hedge and lay it, traditionally.
3. Dig away the soil at the bottom of the garden to make a flat area, where I could build a shed and have a workspace for woodland crafts, woodcarving and the like.
4. Terrace the rest of the garden, to a greater or lesser extent, dividing it informally into 'zones', becoming wilder and more 'woodsy' as one progresses down the garden.
5. Have a pond, somewhere amidst all that.
   

That was my starting point. I had, effectively, a budget of bugger all and no materials other than what I could find or scrounge. What I did have, however, was a collection of good tools, a fertile imagination, physical ability and some of the skills needed to cultivate my ideas to fruition. Occasional injections of cash from unexpected sources enabled the odd luxury in terms of materials I mightn't otherwise have been able to afford, and allowed certain bottlenecks in progress to be overcome but, generally, I worked with found materials and made it up as I went along!

The garden has been one of my passions since moving here and, even now in 2008, it still is. It has a long way to go before completion, and continues to evolve, guiding me as much as I guide it.

I should have told this story from the beginning perhaps, but I'm a relative newcomer to blogging, and was certainly not blogging when we moved in here. My partner, Jude, has described parts of the garden and its evolution, on her blog. It's elicited such interest from people that I decided I'm going to tell the tale myself, going right back to the start of it all. I'll do it in instalments, recalling what I did and how the ideas became reality, and I'll continue, once we're up to date, so that the continuing evolution of the garden is broadcast to anyone who may have an interest in such things.

The significance of the garden's location and situation will become ever more apparent as the episodes unfold, as will our lack of disposable income. With ample money, there is no way that the garden would have ended up the way it is and is becoming. Poverty is the artist, every bit as much as I am. Hopefully I can show you that, even with almost nothing, you can create a fantastic garden, and that the resultant garden will be all the better for it, because you'll be pushed into using that most powerful and creative of the tools at your disposal; your imagination.

I intend to tell the story of how this...



Was turned into this...

The Yawning Man

I yawned this morning. It was a big yawn, the sort that forces your eyes shut and squeezes out tears, whilst your face contorts like an opera singer on a high note. You can't help it.

And yawns breed yawns, don't they? You yawn, and then you can feel the next one, down in the top of your chest, like a geyser waiting to erupt.

It got me thinking of this film I saw as a kid. Saw it at the pictures with my mam and dad. Tom Thumb, with Russ Tamblyn as Tom. It was a musical. I don't like musicals, with the exception of The Blues Brothers, and maybe The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I kind of like but dislike at the same time.

Tim Curry as Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show which, apart from the makeup, could be me in my 5th form school year photo; same expression, same pose, everything (will scan and post it to compare later)

Anyway, there was this scene, right, in Tom Thumb, where Tom is introduced to The Yawning Man, a claymation figure who comes out of a box to sing the Yawning Man song. The character is voiced by the great Stan Freberg, who voiced many characters in classic Warner Bros cartoons of the '40s and '50s.

The reason I thought of this was the way in which the scene in the film, where the Yawning Man sings his yawning song, had the effect of making everyone in the cinema yawn! You just couldn't help yourself; proof, if needed, that yawns really are infectious, and the old phrase "I caught your yawn" has some basis in truth.

So, here it is. I just watched it and it still makes me yawn. How about you?

Unfortunately, youtube no longer allow embedding for this clip, so here's a dirtect link. I challenge you to watch without yawning!
http://youtu.be/vEJy-xtHfHY

'Klunkerz'; a film about mountain bike history, and ShAFF opening night

Well folks (if anyone's reading this), tonight is the official opening night of the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival (ShAFF), at The Showroom Cinema. There'll be an opening ceremony to herald several days of top outdoor action films from around the world (see my last blog entry below).

The festival has actually already started, hosting a series of FREE films at the Cafe Euro on John Street (just off Bramall lane). Last night, me and Jude went to see Klunkerz there, a great film about the bizarre mix of Californian hippies and road-racers who 'invented' mountain biking, and without which we would likely not have the mountain bike as we know it today. A great movie and totally free! Clip below...



There's a film on at Cafe Euro every night this week. The cafe is just a short walk from town, not far past Decathlon, and is worth it. So if you want to be entertained for an hour or two, for the price of a coffee or a beer, go there!
The programme of films is here.

Sheffield Adventure Film Festival 2008 - ShAFF

ShAFF - February 29th to March 2nd 2008

Baffin - an Island of Children

NB. all photos are authorised publicity stills from actual films shown at ShAFF; click on image for full size pic.


Above; Aerialist


Above; Committed

Next week sees the opening of what is becoming one of the UK's premier film festivals, the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival, or ShAFF for short. Organised by the ubiquitous and industrious Matt Heason, who also organises the Cliffhanger Festival in August, it is perhaps a little different from the various other 'mountain' film festivals in the UK and around the World.

Seasons

Different? Well, although Sheffield is unarguably one of the cultural meccas of the UK climbing community, due to its proximity to the Peak District's prime rock, coupled to the self-contained climbing 'scene' which has long been a feature of the city, ShAFF reflects not just this specific heritage but also that of other outdoor activities, adventure 'sports' if you will (though I loathe the term 'sport' applied to climbing and the like - sport has rules, these activities are anarchic and self-governing, without formal structures).


Epherme

These other activites include many familiar to Sheffield's climbers: mountain biking, in all its forms (and to the non biker, you'll be surprised how varied it is); skiiing (and we aren't talking ski Sunday here!); skateboarding; BASE jumping (jumping off big cliffs with parachutes); kayaking; surfing; high-lining (tightropes, sort of); kiting; ice-caving and many more.

No Friends on a Powder Day

Cerro Lautarro - Patagonia's Ice Volcano

There's even climbing animation!

Coast to Coast

Climbing itself is represented in all its disciplines: bouldering; traditional rock climbing; soloing (ie. climbing without ropes); ice climbing; big wall rock climbing; mountaineering. These disciplines have evolved over the past 30 years to the point where they are almost separate activities, and some climbers nowadays specialise only in one or two, unlike the past, when climbers would do a bit of all of these, as well as caving when the weather was too wet to climb!


Heterocere


The Tower

Whether you climb, ride, chuck yourself off cliffs or just want a couple of hours of sweaty-palmed excitement, I urge you to go to the ShAFF website, look at the film programme and pick yourself a film in the early part of the festival. Most are on at the Showroom cinema which is, quite literally, a stone's throw from Sheffield train station.


24 solo -XC mountain biking at its most gruelling

Just in case you're thinking that this smacks of macho flexing and testosterone-fuelled willy-waving, enshrined in narcissistic, self-referential films, let me tell you that not only will these films give you an insight into the mindset of the people who do these sort of things (who are, by and large, surprisingly normal), but you'll find that there are a lot of films featuring women, and not a few featuring people who aren't old enough to buy a pint yet.



Contrary to media portrayals of 'adrenaline' or 'extreme' sports, we're not all air-punching frat-boys, straining for the ultimate rush. Most of us find such portrayals laughable and embarrassing. Come to the bar after filming and you can probably meet a good few of the people portrayed in the films.

In-flux

Tickets for each show cost around a fiver, and the reason I urge you to get a ticket for an early show is that I guarantee you'll want to see more! I ought to point out that some of the films are short, and where this is the case, they are grouped together so that no programme is less than about 80-90 minutes, and some are way longer. If you wanna see a few, use the film selection tool at the top of the ShAFF website programme.

Ama Dablam

The Showroom itself also has a large and comfy bar which serves excellent food by daytime, and is a great social venue at al times. Beer choice is restricted to quality continentals (Leffe Blonde and Hoegaarden) or generic keg beers and guinness.


The Showroom, from just outside the train station entrance

Should the Showroom prices or choice not appeal, then the Rutland Arms is one of Sheffield's finest real ale pubs and lies 150m along the road (walk along the road past the giant 'kettles' of the HUBS student's union,

and keep going til you come to the Rutland on the corner). If the weather is nice, it has a superb outdoor beer garden. This is one of the few pubs where you can sink a pint of real ale whilst listening to the Cocteau Twins, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Miles Davis or a variety of 60s ska or 70s punk, jazz, soul or folk.

Close to the Edge

The full programme is available in list format here.

20 Seconds of Joy

Underdeveloped

My name is BrianT. If you see me there, say hi, and you'll find that I'm a very friendly bloke. Hope to see you there. If you need any advice about Sheffield (pubs, food, transport, where is it?), don't hesitate to mail me at btrevelyan@gmail.com, and if you are on facebook, feel free to add me to your collection of friends.

My glamorous partner, Sheffield author Jude Calvert-Toulmin, has also blogged about ShAFF. She was recently interviewed on a local radio station, so the ShAFF entry is beneath the most recent one, about the interview. She will be taking time out from her full-time job as her own PR Manager, to attend many of the screenings at ShAFF.

Jude Calvert-Toulmin

Just a cat: Farewell to Towser

He was just a cat, when I first met him. He sniffed round me, unsure of me, then warmed to me when I offered him peekaboo fingers round Jude's gatepost, which he vigorously attacked with his little paws. I noticed then how the tufts of white hair poked out from between his toes, kept immaculately clean by his constant grooming. With his pointy fur 'sideburns', he looked like a cartoon cat, like Sylvester or Tom or Top Cat, but was funnier than all three.

He was just a cat, but never a big cat, or a heavy cat, even at 13. His long soft fur hid the lightness and smallness of his frame. Towards the end though, he felt hollow, like a bird, as his muscles wasted away and the flesh fell from his bones. I picked him up and stroked him, just five days ago, the day he stopped eating, and I felt each rib, and the knobs of his backbone, still hidden beneath his deceptively fluffy coat. The picture of him under his fur was no longer a pretty one. I worried then. I worried that he was going, like Barney back in May, wasting away until his spirit left his body like the last wisp of smoke from a dying candle.

He was just a cat. He was just a cat, but he was much more than that. "Just a cat" is what soulless people say. I have no time for people like that. Say that to me and I'll laugh in your stupid face.

He was just a cat, and he was my friend. He knew me as well as I knew him. We understood each other, each in our own way. We trusted each other. He knew I'd never hurt him. He showed it in so many ways: in waiting for me to come up the road on my bike after work, just so he could roll on the ground and purr and stretch whilst I rubbed his sheepskin tummy; in the way he'd be there sometimes, on the pillow next to my head when I woke on a morning, sleeping softly, or the way he followed me down the garden and sat vigilant on a rock, defying the Big Toms of the neighbourhood to come near, because I was there to scare them off.

He was just a cat and I worried about him, when the vet named his illness, his reason for wasting. When he stopped eating and just lay there, eyes dull, I already missed him. I missed my friend, missed his mincing walk and his feather-duster tail and his constant need to sit on my knee whenever I sat down. Missed the way he used to sit on the table and reach out with his paw when it was feeding time as if to say "just give me the tin, I'll open it". I forgave him all the times he deftly flipped a piece of food off my plate as I ate, and ran off to eat it under the table.

He was just a cat, and I could see him waiting for death to come and I knew he was going, even as I muttered unfelt words of hope. The operation which would save his life was already planned, but he was never going to reach it.

He was just a cat, but yesterday I woke up and he wasn't there, and he wasn't just a cat, he was an empty space, an absence of cat, and a gentle fear in my mind. I looked and looked and found him, lying amidst dead wet leaves in the back garden, under a bench. He was cold, like he'd lain there for hours in the rain and dark. I carried his weightless body in as he purred gently against my chest.

He was just a cat and he's gone now. A last straw was clutched at with a night spent in a vet's cage, fed by a tube. Poor small, soft Towser, in a cage, without his friends, alone, would never see his home again. I can still feel his paw against my lips, waking me just days ago, to tell me it was breakfast time. I can still feel it, warm and soft, with the faint trace of claws. Yes, I can feel that and I always will, even though I'll never feel it again.

He was just a cat, but he was himself, his own being, unlike all other cats. He was Towser, and I wanted him to stay Towser and carry on being just a cat. I wasn't there when the needle went in. I never got to stroke his fur and hear his last purr. I never said goodbye to my friend.

Goodbye Towser my friend. You were just a cat, but I'm just a man.

Below: Jude with Towser as a kitten

Below: a distraught and tearful Jude cradles Towser's body, 5th December 2007

Below: Towser in typical repose

Below: Towsers "sheepskin tummy"


Below: Me relaxing with the cats in our back garden, after a bike ride; summer 2004


Below: Towser sitting on Barney's coffin; April 2007

Below: returning home for the final time

Sheffield Documentary Film Festival 2007

Well, that was good.

By 'that', I mean to say, the 2007 Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, at which Jude and I have virtually lived for the past 5 days.

In and out of the Showroom, between bar and cinema, Guinness, pints of Stella, Leffe, Hoegaarden, meeting and chatting to strangers, being tired, being thrilled, being excited by superb documentaries of all shapes, colours and sizes.

Jude will be blogging in detail about it, but highlights for me were:

The BUZZ of the whole thing - mainly industry movers, shakers, up-and-comers and wannabees, BBC, C4, SKY and Five, mingling with directors, producers, presenters and a smattering (a mere smidgeon) of the general public;

Jude's infectious enthusiasm for her volunteer work on the festival team, which led to her winning a prize for being one of the best of the 80-strong team;

The FILMS - so many to choose from, so many quickly sold out, forcing unexpectedly astonishing second or third choices to the front;

The people, from pinstriped 'Lee' who lost all interest in talking to me once he discovered I wasn't in the industry, to Phil, the young producer of The Cuban Skateboard Crisis, who ended up talking to me about his film and about the mend-and-make-do skateboard scene in Cuba;

Chatting briefly to Ross Kemp at the bar, and realising he's not as tall as me. Friendly bloke though;

Film highlights I managed to catch included:

To the Limit, a film by Pepe Danquart and Kirsten Hager, about Austrian climbing prodigies, the Huber brothers, Alex and Thomas, set against their audacious attempt to set a new speed climbing record for the 3,600 foot high Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite. Awesome is for once an apt word. The film tells us more about the characters than about the climb, and is all the richer for it. Best climbing film I've seen by far, though whether the linearly-thinking climbing community at large will agree, remains to be seen.

Other great fims were:

The English Surgeon, a documentary by producer/director Geoffrey Smith, about top neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, and his selfless efforts to help save lives in Ukraine, where people die needlessly on a daily basis from entirely operable brain tumours. A moving film which has me on the verge of tears. Coming to a TV near you soon, I expect.

Below: The remarkable Henry Marsh

Echoes of Home, by Stefan Schweitert, about three remarkable and taklented musicians who have taken the age-old Swiss folk tradition of yodelling, which began as a cattle-calling series of whoops (as we are shown), into the 21st century, developing it into a beautiful and unique avant-garde musical genre. For any lover of new and often strange-sounding musics, this film is a must. Seeing Swiss yodeller Christian Zehnder, 'jamming' in a yurt in Mongolia, with Tuvan throat-singers, was truly wonderful, and the embarrassment of Erika Stucky's teenage daughter, who thinks her exuberant and likeable mum (pictured below) "sometimes goes too far", would provide knowing amusement to parents of teenage girls everywhere.

Gerald hauzenberger's Beyond the Forest, a heartwarming, funny and, ultimately, vaguely unsettling portrait of two old people, one of Saxon stock, one descended from the Landlers, who linger on, against their own expectations, in the astonishingly mediaeval environs of rural Transylvania.

All White in Barking, by Marc Isaacs, a study of the benign xenophobia of a handful of white inhabitants of Barking, faced with what they see as an unstoppable wave of immigration. Unintentionally hilarious in places, it also paints an unsettling picture of ignorance and fear which bodes ill for society.

For anyone who loves quality, well thought-out documentaries, the festival is a must. It's easy to dismiss doccos as being second fiddle to drama feature films but a 1 or 2 hour docco can be every bit as rivetting, moving and thought-provoking, if not more, because it depicts a reality rather than a construct.

Whatever, we'll be there again next year.

Spooky Woods, Glentress. Mountain bike heaven!

Back in 2003, me and Jude went to Glentress, near Peebles, 20 miles or so South of Edinburgh, to meet some mates for some mountain biking fun. Glentress is one of the increasing number of Forestry Commission forests which are being equipped with purpose made mtb trails. We did a brilliant 20 odd mile circuit including some of the best singletrack (narrow track, one bike wide). It included this, the descent through the brilliantly named Spooky Woods, captured wonderfully on helmet cam with some excellent self-composed music to accompany...

Blue tits and woodpeckers

Back in March, our next door neighbour, David, gave me a nestbox. Dave is a long-standing member of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), and has an assortment of variously-sized nestboxes scattered about his large garden.

The box he gave me was one he'd made, from bits of an old pallet probably (Dave's a great one for making quality items from recycled timber), and was designed for a Blue Tit. It's all to do with the size of the hole, apparently.

Now, I've been a sort of half-hearted twitcher since childhood. I love most living things, and birds are interesting, amusing, and occasionally, exciting and spectacular, but I'd never had a nestbox, so I was grateful to David's gift. I knew that birds were nesting so I had to get it up quick if I hoped to catch a pair for this year.

Two days later, I was up a ladder, in the large weeping willow which spraeds like a great umbrella over the central part of our back garden. There was a 4" branch stub projecting from one of the main branches which looked perfect. It was on the North side of the tree, which I figured would be best, as it would be out of the heat of the sun.

I screwed the box securely into place, and left it. Within a day, there were birds visiting. First up, a Great Tit, who obviously liked the property, but found the front entrance a bit tight. He was followed by a Blue Tit, who popped inside, back out, then repeated the in-out movement several times, obviously having a good look around. Then he proceeded to start pecking and tugging industriously at the edge of the hole, presumably tidying up the rough sawn margins, until he was satisfied.

Below: Blue Tit

A few days later, I sat quietly in the garden, and was delighted to see a pair of Blue Tits busily flying to and from the box, carrying bits and pieces of material for the nest. We had tenants!
After a week or so, I began to wonder if the birds had deserted the nest, as I couldn't see them, but then one evening I saw the male fly to the box and go inside, carrying something in his beak, so I knew they were still there.

Below: 'Time for your close-up Mr Tit!'


Two weeks ago, I eased myself into the hanging swing-chair suspended from the weeping willow, directly beneath the nestbox. Once I'd been quiet for a minute or so, I realised that I could hear loud cheeping coming from the box. The eggs had hatched!

On Monday, I was scanning the trees out the back with the binoculars, laid on the Mammoth Bed. I noticed a movement in a Goat Willow two gardens along from ours, and focussing in, I could see it was a young fledgling Blue Tit, sitting plumply on a branch, still with bits of fluffy down clinging to its plumage. The adults visited it every minute or two, bringing it food, as it waited patiently. I don't know if it was one of ours or not, or whether they have yet to fledge. If it was then I wonder where the others are. There was obviously more than one in the box. Fingers crossed they all made it.

Below: baby blue tits: aaaah!

As an addendum, I've heard the drumming of woodpeckers a few times in the woods at the back of the house, but never seen one. Whilst I was scanning the trees with the binocs laid on the bed as already described, I looked up and down the trunk of a huge ash at the foot of the garden, which has only just come into leaf. To my delight, a woodpecker flew directly into my field of view, alighting on the sunlit trunk for a second, then flying off again. I had no time to study it, but got a good impression of its size and markings, leaving me in no doubt that it was a Great Spotted Woodpecker. First time I've ever seen one, despite hearing them all my life.

Below: Great Spotted Woodpecker

Next year, I may try and build a box for Long-Tailed Tits, which seem to be common where we live. I'd also love a Tawny Owl box, as these lovely animals call all night in the woods, but are so hard to spot.

Below: Long-tailed Tit

Then there's the Treecreepers, the Wrens, Robins, bats. It's all happening! I had a normally cautious Jay so close I could have touched it, had I dared move, last weekend. Beautiful bird, and bags of intelligence by the way it peered intently at me, as most of the Corvids do.

Below: a Jay


The next bit in the bird saga came last weekend, when we'd been out overnight at a friend's house, after the Peace in the Park festival in Endcliffe Park, Sheffield (see Jude's blog article about it here). Jude was upstairs when I noticed our cat, Towser, peering intently beneath the sofa in our living room. Behind the sofa is a fireplace, boarded over with a sheet of plywood.

As I looked to see what he was after, I heard a distinct scratching, fluttering noise. There was a bird down the chimney! Lucky bird. Of all the chimneys it could have fallen down, it chose one with no gas fire, just a sheet of thin plywood!

I dragged the sofa out of the way, unscrewed the plywood and peered inside. There sat the dirtiest young Starling I've ever seen, covered in sooty dust, but crouched defiantly and gazing up at me with its shiny black eye, as if saying "come on then, if you're 'ard enough!"

I put the board back in place, then closed the curtains, to stop it trying to fly through the window and breaking its neck, then took the board away. Immediately it tried to fly out, and flew to the top of the curtains where a small chink of light shone in. I managed to get hold of it, and carefully prised its claws off the fabric, then took it out the doors at the back. I let it go and it flew a few yards to sit on the fence, where it glared at me, as if it was all my fault, then let out a croaky squawk, before indulging in some serious beak-wiping on top of the fence (classic inter-species bird behaviour indicating displaced aggression, presumably, in this case, at me).

Below: "CROAKY SQUAWK!!"

The croak made me think it might be dehydrated and hungry, so I crumbled up some horrible caramel ryvitas, and put them with a bowl of water on the bird table on the opposite side of the decking. The starling watched me and when I returned inside, flew across, hoovering up the crumbs, before taking several long drinks of water.

I watched it until it flew off, and felt smug for the rest of the day.

Below: "it's all your fault!"

Incidentally, there's a Starling in our neighbourhood who does a great impression of a mobile phone ringtone!

I knew living next to the woods would be good. All I need now is to see the badgers which make so much noise when darkness falls...