Francis Pryor's Blog, page 20

The Fascination of Concrete…

The physical remains of our past are generally beautiful to look at. I don’t know whether it’s a result of time, antiquity or our imagination. Ancient churches are one thing, but even standing stones look wonderful, as they defy the passing years. Dare I say it, but those terribly eroded rocks in the muddy reservoir at Tottiford on the edge of Dartmoor, looked good. But no, this doesn’t seem to apply to concrete. Cement, yes: I love the soft crumbly lime mortar of medieval towers and churches, but that’s quite different, to concrete. Concrete. It’s what the modern world’s built of and I have to say I don’t like it much. But then I didn’t use to like eating live oysters, or asparagus, come to that – and I quickly learned the error of my ways, helped no doubt by the freely flowing hormones of puberty (which shape more than just your dangling bits).

So I’ve decided to start liking concrete, and it has been, I have to concede, quite a slow process. I can remember being taken for a drive along the M1 when it was first opened. I was at school and my father took me out one weekend in his new car, a Lancia I think it was. In those days the 70 mph limit hadn’t been invented and we hit 125 somewhere north of Watford. Then a Reliant Robin three-wheeler wobbled into our path and it all nearly came to a sticky end. My father grimly muttered something about the use of mirrors. People, men especially, were more Victorian and generally buttoned-up in the 1950s.  But I’m starting to digress.

Bridge carrying the M1 over the A43 near Northampton.

I recently returned to the M1 for my book on The Birth of Modern Britain, where I’ve reproduced a picture of one of the original (1959) concrete bridges, designed by Sir Owen Williams and Partners. It was actually quite hard to find an original 1950s bridge, as so many have already been replaced by lighter-weight and stronger modern ones. I hope the early ones have been Scheduled to give them legal protection, and yes, I do quite like them: they’re a bit fussy and the surface of the concrete is often given a woody texture (by using plywood formers). So as modern bridges go, they’ve grown into middle-age quite gracefully and they’ve weathered much better than the much harder materials used today. And then there’s wartime concrete.

The concrete used in the last war looks as though it has been mixed by someone with a spade or a hand-operated cement-mixer. In other words, it barely looks mixed at all. I’ve looked at loads of WW2 concrete, in pill-boxes, gun emplacements, forts, walls and AT (anti-tank) cubes and almost always, it’s poorly mixed. And why? Because the work was done in a frantic rush in about six to eight months in 1940/1. That rapidly-mixed concrete tells its own story. People were scared, and rightly so. OK, they kept calm, but they didn’t just carry on, like so many suet puddings. No, they rolled up their sleeves and mixed concrete. Men and women. Old and young. It was those human beings with their spades and shovels which got me started. And now, I’m afraid, I’m a fully-fledged ‘concrete anorak’.  The period and its rapidly vanishing remains have grown to fascinate me – no, that’s the wrong word, ‘haunt’ is closer to it.

So I was not surprised to come across two sets of AT cubes when I was filming for a Time Team documentary last week with SIR Tony Robinson. And while I’m at it, huge congratulations to you Tony, your knighthood is richly deserved, especially for your acting and archaeological work. But I suspect it was largely given for your role in politics. As far as I’m concerned you’d have merited one even if you’d never joined the Labour Party (which is far more than can be said for Tory Knights whose main claim to fame is that they gave huge sums to the Party which they’d earned through running hedge funds – cue strong stench of rotting flesh and putrefaction). But again, I digress.

We’d been filming along the Northumberland coast at two locations, both of which coincidentally featured AT cubes. Our film was about another topic entirely (more about it in future blogs when I get the go-ahead from Channel 4), but to come across AT cubes at two different sites, entirely at random, shows how many were constructed. One set had been bulldozed from their original position to form the outfall of a reservoir. I have to say this slightly annoyed me, but then even in the recent past such things weren’t appreciated for what they were. Then at our second location we drove past a wonderful double row of cubes, just set back from the foreshore and overlooking a huge, and very shallow tidal mudflat. These were clearly still in situ and the concrete was wonderfully rough. Those cubes simply shouted defiance and desperation. They also reminded me that today the issues that face us are far more complex than just Good versus Evil. Now it’s all, dare I say it, different shades of grey – aptly, the colour of most modern concrete.

AT (anti-tank) cubes re-arranged to form breakwater (left) and reservoir outfall (right).

AT cubes in situ just above the High Tide line.

Close-up of an in-situ AT cube, showing the characteristic rough mix of early WW2 concrete.

Flaming (Almost) June

How I wish I could spend longer in the garden at this time of year! Everything is happening at once: the grass is growing like an express train, weeds are popping up from bare earth and suddenly the air is filled with wonderful scents from wisteria and viburnums and the last wallflowers. Even the burgeoning box hedges smell superb. Meanwhile in the hay meadow, the mix of grasses and wildflowers has changed; the first timothy grasses are showing their seed heads and meadow buttercups are everywhere. We’ll be making hay in less than a month, at this rate. So things are, at long, long last starting to catch-up. I reckon we’re only a month behind an average season, now. I’ve even decided to stop cutting the asparagus.

As always seems to happen, my non-gardening life gets frantically busy at such times as these. I’ve recently been away in York; before that it was the Hay Festival, then next week I’ll be off to film in Northumberland for a Time Team documentary (to be screened in the autumn/winter). And I must do some more work to promote my detective/thriller The Lifers’ Club, which still needs many more subscribers (currently we’re stuck at 54% of what we need). I’ve also just put the phone down after an interview with BBC Radio Cambridgeshire about an insane plan to cover 900 acres of Fen-edge near Peterborough with solar panels and wind turbines. The mind boggles at the archaeological damage they’ll do. Local opposition is intense – and yet the developer is the local authority, who also arbitrate on such matters as archaeology – so they can’t lose! The trouble is, all these things take time, and me, away from my garden – grrr!

So for this blog post I thought I’d like to give you a few glimpses of the summer garden as it starts to come into life. So far it’s been a wonderful year for woody ‘tree’ peonies (we’re particularly proud of our white flowered one which is about 15 years old), wisteria and the flowering rhubarb, which looked so rude in that picture I posted earlier in the season. The oriental poppies and pleached limes are always attractive – the latter demonstrating clearly what’s meant by ‘lime green’.

A Japanese hybrid tree peony, bought many years ago (we’ve long since lost its name).

Wisteria sinensis on the front of the house, just coming into full flower.

Flowering rhubarb, Rheum palmatum rubrum.

An old variety of Oriental poppy, ‘Goliath’.

Pleached limes. These are the small-leaf native form (Tilia cordata).

My Favourite Pictures: The Great Iron Bridge (1779)

I’ve been a very keen photographer all my life, starting as a child with a box Brownie, then moving on to a large Ilford, which I can remember taking to the Farnborough Air Show several years running. Later I acquired other cameras, usually 120 or 35mm format, which I sometimes lost on digs, or in pub car parks. It wasn’t until I started working for the Royal Ontario Museum in 1969 that I started to cherish the cameras I was given, starting, in 1970 with a superb Nikon F, with a detachable photomic head (for any camera nerds who might be reading). I loved that camera dearly: it was easy to use and very durable; several times I left it on the Land-Rover wing and drove off – I even got to recognise the sound of it hitting the loose gravel in the excavation car park. On those early digs we also used Pentax Spotmatics and Olympus OM1s – both excellent, tough cameras. When larger format pictures were needed, I used various twin-lens and single-lens reflex 120 format cameras, all of which I still possess and am loathe to part with. Today I take my serious, ‘heavy duty’ pictures with a Nikon D300, which feels and handles very much like my last film camera, a Nikon F4. I used to take my big Nikons on Time Team shoots, but they nearly got smashed several times, when left on the side of the trench during filming; so for the past few years I’ve taken to a very rugged  little Olympus 10 megapixel, µ Tough. The pictures it takes are almost indistinguishable from those of the big D-SLRs. But that’s quite enough tekky-speak for this, and several future, blog posts.

I think it’s very important to have a solid theoretical understanding of photography, which is, of course, much the same whether one is using film or digital formats. As most of my pictures are of landscapes, I tend to favour slow film speeds (down to ISO 250 most times, unless the light is poor). To get decent depth-of-field I go for small apertures and the slowest time I can manage – say 1/60th. I know it’s becoming fashionable to use tripods, or even monopods, and I have several, BUT (and it’s a big ‘but’) I detest having to walk around people at almost every country house we’ve visited of late, who set their tripods up in the centre of narrow garden paths, where they block everyone’s access while they ostentatiously compose, and then take, a picture. I can say with hand on heart that none of the photos taken by me for The Making of the British Landscape, nor The Birth of Modern Britain involved tripods. If you can’t hold a camera steady at even 1/30th of a second then you’re in the wrong business. I think that for many posey amateur photographers the tripod is a symbol of masculinity. God help their poor wives and partners! I can imagine what they discuss at breakfast:

‘I’m so envious of Johnny…’

‘Really, darling, why’s that?’.

‘He’s so rich!’

‘So what. Money can’t buy you everything…’

‘Yes it can! I saw him in Winchester on Wednesday. Outside the Cathedral. And guess what?’

‘What?’

‘He had a Benbo 1!’

‘Is that good?’

‘Good? It’s massive. Has a huge extension – and it’s water-proof!!!’

But I digress. So I thought I’d do a series of posts about some of the photos I’ve taken over the years that may, or may not, have appeared in my books. So I thought I’d start the new strand with Thomas Farnolls Pritchard’s great iron bridge at Ironbridge, near Telford. As I think I said in The Making of the British Landscape, that bridge is, for me at least, the most exciting, the most magnificent building or ancient monument in Britain. Effectively it’s the very first iron bridge of all and instead of spanning a minor stream or somesuch, it tackles the awe-inspiring chasm of the Avon Gorge. It has had to be under-pinned in recent times, but even so, managed to stand completely unaided for some two hundred years, since its construction, back in 1779. The ironwork was produced at Abraham Darby III’s foundry at Coalbrookdale, nearby.

Originally we planned to have all the pictures in The Making of the British Landscape reproduced in colour, but then the bankers’ bubble burst, and our plans had to be curtailed. Most of the black-and-white images work quite well, but sadly I don’t think the two monochrome versions of the bridge were anything like as good as their colour originals, which I’ve added to this blog – plus an additional one for good luck. They were taken with a Nikon D70 (because it accepted the lenses of my old F4) and the underside view of the bridge structure was slightly tweaked in Photoshop, to lighten the shadows. As a rule, I try to keep such tweaking to a minimum. It’s worth noting here that the ironwork structure of the bridge was held together using carpenter’s joints, rather than the rivets, screws, nuts and bolts that were yet to appear on the scene, as regular features.

Anyhow, while I was working on those pictures for this blog, I determined to revisit it over the summer. Indeed, whenever I’m in the area I like to call in on Ironbridge to pay my respects.  But it’s not enough to view it from the car. I have to get out and walk across it. Just standing there, at the centre of the great arch, and staring down at the tumbling waters of the mighty Avon, is rich food for the soul.

Late Spring in the Garden

Time for a quick post before I immerse myself in the frantic, if cultured world of the Hay-on-Wye Festival. Time, too, for a quiet stroll through the garden and assessing the state of the season – and we still haven’t caught up. I took dozens of pictures on May 3rd and have just up-loaded them into my computer and they could have been taken in early April, or even late March. The same goes for what I’m looking at now: the daffodils have mostly finished, but some are still in flower, like Old Pheasant Eye and several species of jonquils (some varieties rather surprisingly thrive in wet places). In fact the garden looks remarkably colourless for what ought to be the beginning of summer, but Maisie’s efforts last autumn, when she planted bulbs and wallflowers in several large clay pots and urns are really paying dividends now. She planted wallflowers in some tall, trumpet-shaped pots (I think they’re Yorkshire Pots – a bit more expensive, but worth every penny as they never crack, no matter how severe the frost), which are now looking gorgeous. We both prefer the old-fashioned mixed blooms of the variety Persian Carpet, which smell superb and have wonderfully restful colours.

Wallflowers (‘Persian Carpet’).

Every year different part of the garden delight, while some, sadly disappoint. I’ll steer clear of the latter, if you don’t mind, but this year’s successes have included the two soak-aways we dug back in 1993, shortly after we built the timber barn. Originally I planned to run the water off the roof into the pond, but I was forced to abandon that plan (it would interfere with the house’s phone line and water mains), so we decided to dig two separate bog gardens, instead. And rather to my surprise they’ve been a huge success. This year the Skunk Cabbage has been magnificent, better even than last year, and the variegated wet-loving irises (Iris laevigata) around it have never looked better, either. The late season has held them back, so that their leaves are still sharp and bright, and the Solomon’s Seal on the soak-away banks is in full flower. There’s a Hosta there too, also thriving, which I had planned to move somewhere else in the autumn, but didn’t get around to it. Now, I think it’ll stay where it is. As usual, the credit for the colour co-ordination goes to Maisie who can carry precise hues, to the subtlest of shades, in her mind – a sort of colourist’s perfect pitch; I can describe it no other way – and I certainly can’t do it. My subtle plans usually end up as violent clashes – which sometimes we both rather like, as neither of us, I’m afraid, have Metropolitan good taste.

One of the two barn soak-away bog gardens.

We ‘designed’ our garden ourselves, as I’ve described in an earlier post, and its layout reflects not just our shared tastes, but our resources. We’re both archaeologists, which is another way of saying that we’re both broke, for most of the time. And no, appearing on Time Team doesn’t make you rich: I’d earn far more money as a consultant; I suspect most City bankers earn in a week what we both earn in a year. So we’ve done the garden on a shoestring: hedges, rather than brick walls; stepping stones, rather than paved paths, and cut-edges without any reinforcement. Even our formal features tend to be a bit hit-and-miss. We planted two white-bark birches (Betula jacquemontii) to be a sort of formal portal from a small hedged garden (the only thing resembling a ‘room’), into the main meadow. And they’re now starting to get established. When we planted them, which was in the winter, we forgot that there were a few bulbs of the American equivalent of our Bluebells, the Quamash (Camassia esculenta), around their roots, which I never got round to removing. But now I’m glad I didn’t: the blue flowers and dramatic leaves of the Camassias work well with the birch bark. Camassias love our heavy wet soil, but they do reproduce fast and can become a bit thuggish, if you let them. So plant them somewhere where you can dig them up, if needs be.

Quamash (Camassia esculenta) and birch trees.

I said we don’t ‘do’ formality, but long double borders must have some sort of focus. The main one has a large pergola, which took me months to build, and a smaller one parallel to it has the house at one end, which is fine, but the big old vegetable garden hedge at the other, which isn’t. So we decided to put a large pot-like jardinière in front of it (Maisie found the pieces buried in an old garden of hers). We planted various bulbs and things in it, but they only provided focus for a short time. Then she had the idea of planting the naturally layered-looking, variegated version of Cornus alternifolia, which only requires an occasional light pruning and stands out superbly from the hornbeam hedge behind it. It’s looking particularly good this year. But by this point in our walk, Twink was getting bored and wanted to do something different. So she refused to budge from the tasteful picture I was trying to frame. With a dog like that, my photos will never make it into The English Garden.

The jardinière and Twink.

Nearly A Real Writer!

If I am completely honest with myself (something I try to do as infrequently as possible) I’ve always wanted to be a real writer. ‘But you are!’ I hear my sheepdog Twink bark loyally from outside my office’s open window. But what does a mere bitch know about such lofty aspirations? If I’d asked her opinion about flushing stuck lambs out of a half-blocked culvert in a dyke, I might have taken her seriously. But no, not literature: that was never her strong point. But to answer her implied question, I am an author, specialising in archaeology and landscape history – and that’s not the same thing at all. It’s not quite as lowly as writing something like historical romances, bodice-rippers, that sort of thing, but it’s nowhere near the literary stratospheres. Great literary critics would never waste their talents discussing the merits of a book like The Making of the British Landscape. And why not? Because it’s not ‘literary’ in the accepted meaning of the word. It’s ‘factual’ or ‘non-fiction’. And if I may allow myself a brief rant (and digression, which I promise not to prolong), why is it considered OK to label a genre as massively huge in both volume and scope as ‘non-fiction’ by describing  it in negative terms; by what it isn’t?  It’s rather like calling serious novels ‘non-thrillers’ or even better, ‘non-non-fiction’. End of digression.

Real writers write fiction and/or poetry. I once wrote a short poem when I was about twelve, but then I read it again in the morning – and I realised I’m no John Keats. Make no mistake, I love poetry, but that doesn’t make me a poet. Now, however, things are about to change. I’ve written a work of fiction, The Lifers’ Club and when/if it’s published, I already have plans for another. So will I shortly become a fully-fledged writer, rather than a mere landscape and archaeology author? Will I be able to go to Hay and hold my head high in the Green Room? Will I? Please say Yes someone.

And the answer to that question is indeed Yes, but first I must acquire some writerly accessories, and the first of these has to be a shed. Now I’ve published a view of my shed on the Unbound website and frankly it’s a disorganised tip and barely worthy of being called a hut. A bloody awful mess. Truly authorial. Nothing even remotely writerly about it. The likes of Philip Pullman or Roald Dahl wouldn’t be seen dead in such a place (sorry! Not in very good taste, but what the Hell…). Frankly it was deeply embarrassing and I’m very surprised I had the temerity to put it on the website at all (but Twink insisted, the bitch).

The Authors hut

Then yesterday I finished reorganising, or should that be plain, organising it. And it has been truly transformed.  I think everyone’ll have to agree it now looks highly writerly. And just in time for Hay! WHOOPEE! I can imagine setting my laptop on that potting table and dashing off a few Alan Cadbury short stories for the Literary Review, or Granta, or both.

The Writer’s shed

Now to have a writerly shed is one thing: I’ve also got to acquire some lovably eccentric traits for my future biographer, or, better, biographers to discuss at interminable length when I’m dead (maybe I’ll ask my cousin Charles Moore to do me ‘an official’ one, as he did such a good job for [or should that be ‘on’] Mrs. Thatcher). I’ve even asked Twink and she had nothing remotely sensible to suggest, but dropped a bone on my shoes – some sort of hint, I suppose. I then put the problem to Maisie who looked at me as if I was mad. ‘You could always say you loved zip-wires’, was all she could suggest, but I suspect she hadn’t really thought about it at all. Maybe I could claim I liked to sweeten my tea with WD-40 or RoundUp, but they don’t ring true, either. So if anyone has a bright suggestion to make, could they please either Tweet me (@PryorFrancis) or approach me in person or at the Unbound session at Hay-on-Wye? Now that I’m almost a writer, I’d dearly like to be remembered as ‘that lovable eccentric’. Or would I? Should I? God knows. Best ask Twink, as Maisie left the room about ten minutes ago.

For Where is Chatteris?

I can’t think that I’ve lived for as long as I have without discovering the band Half Man Half Biscuit. I thought my life was complete after buying the Leyton Buzzards’ double-sided classic ‘I Don’t Want to Go to Art School’ and ‘No Dry Ice or Flying Pigs’, which we got in 1979 or ’80, and then almost immediately wore it flat. But a couple of months ago our friends Kate and Ian gave us another Damascene Moment with the wonderful 1/2 Man 1/2 Biscuit CD, Achtung Bono, which doesn’t have a bad track on it. And I mean that: not one. Particular favourites of mine are ‘Restless Legs’, ‘Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo’ and the timeless classic, ‘’For What is Chatteris?’ – which is a very fair question.

Ever since I came out of the closet and confessed to the world that I’d written a crime novel, people have been asking me about my hero, Alan Cadbury. So far I’ve managed to find just one photo of him and I once caught a glimpse of his passport which stated he’d been born in January 1971. Maybe one day I’ll find out if he was born in hospital (probably I suspect, the Pilgrim, in Boston) or on the farm in the Lincolnshire Fens. But although I don’t want to give away too much about him at this stage (because I want you to subscribe to the book, if you haven’t done so already), I can confess that he has very eclectic musical tastes – far more so than his more celebrated, albeit fictional, colleague in crime, Inspector Rebus. Alan, like me, is a huge fan of 0.5 M.0.5 B., but I rather suspect he’s been into them for very much longer than my mere two months.

So just to give you a flavour of Chatteris, Alan and The Lifers’ Club, I thought I’d reproduce the two passages that mention the small Fenland market town, which today is in north Cambridgeshire, but is built almost entirely out of the grey/yellowish brick that’s so characteristic of (old) Huntingdonshire. Why oh why did they have to mess around with long-cherished identities, back in 1974? And ‘Humberside??!!’  I ask you! But I rant, nay, digress. Chatteris is just too far north of Cambridge for most commuters, so has retained its Fenland atmosphere. It’s also by-passed on two sides, so isn’t too congested, nor, I fear, too prosperous, either. The cliché is to describe such small towns as ‘sleepy’, but there are too many agricultural workers and a sharp easterly wind for that. It’s also famous for its fish-and-chips. Need I say more? So here are those extracts, which I’ve slightly doctored so as not to spoil the plot, if and when the book does appear. In the first, Alan describes where he’s currently living:

‘You’ve moved from Leicester?’ [Jake asked Alan].

‘Oh yes, seven years ago. After we’d finished the Flax Hole dig. I landed a big site near Peterborough and moved back to the Fens.’

‘Moved back? So you come from around here?’

‘Yes, I was brought up on a small farm near Crowland…’

‘And now?’

‘Now I’m at Tubney.’ Jake was none the wiser. ‘It’s a little village about ten miles away. Near Chatteris. I’m in a grim bungalow. Everything stinks of diesel…

‘Everything? Even the bathroom…’

‘Yes, even the phone. The place used to be owned by scrappies…’

Ali smiled ruefully.

‘Say no more. Sounds like you’d be better off in here…’

‘Except the village pub’s next door.’

Jake’s smile was neither hostile nor friendly.

‘Oh yes?’

‘The Hat and Feathers. I drink there most nights. Keeps me sane.’

‘So you’re OK, then.’

Somewhere outside a loud bell sounded and people started to leave through a door on the other side of the room. Jake glanced up at the clock on the wall, then said with some disdain:

‘I’d better be off. Feeding time at the zoo.’

The second extract is even shorter. It describes a pub about five miles from Tubney (so not the Hat and Feathers). It’s quite short, but then I don’t ‘do’ long moody descriptions. If you can’t say it briefly, then don’t say it at all. So here it is, all three paragraphs of it, again doctored in key places:

Alan hadn’t wanted to meet Lane at the college after the interview. He didn’t know why. It just felt wrong. There were too many eyes in that place, and if Jake managed to detect even the slightest hint that he was seeing the Law, then the whole project would be dead in the water. So he suggested the Old Slodger.

Traditionally, ‘slodgers’ were fenmen of the south Fens; ‘yellowbellies’ were their Lincolnshire equivalents. This pub was a small independent house with close links to a micro-brewery in Chatteris. Alan knew the beer was always good, the food plentiful and fresh, although a bit robust for London tastes, and the company relaxed. He liked it.

He walked into the bar. A couple of the locals said hello, but then they left him alone. That was another thing he liked about the Slodger: Fen people never crowd you. He ordered a beer and a round of sandwiches, then sat down, taking a copy of the local paper from a rack by the fire. He was starting to warm up and relax. After a quarter of an hour, half a pint and a doorstep sandwich, DI Lane entered.

Now I must go out and spray off some persistent creeping thistles. Next stop: Hay-on-Wye!

Grow Your Own. On Spuds and Broad Beans: Better Late than Never

Is the season at last starting to catch-up? If you’d asked me that a week ago, I’d have probably said yes. Now I’m not so sure, as I sit at my desk, with the south-westerly wind howling around the rafters.

In a normal year I plan to have my potatoes and broad beans planted by the end of March, if at all possible. Sometimes this might mean that the early potatoes go in, in the last week of the month, to be followed by the second earlies and early main-crop a week later (often over the Easter weekend). But there’s absolutely no point in planting potatoes if the ground’s too cold and (in this year) wet: they’d simply rot in the ground. So this year I planted them very late indeed – fully a month later than I would in a good year – on May 3rd. The weather was reasonable and I managed to plant all of them, in five rows: one of first earlies, nearly two of second earlies and three of early main-crop. As I think I explained in earlier Grow Your Own posts, I don’t plant full main-crop spuds, as they mature late in the year and tend to get attacked by slugs in our heavy fen soil. I also refuse absolutely to use slug pellets as these kill toads and hedgehogs, both of which are currently very much in danger.

The secret of growing good spuds is to buy the seed early (I do this in early January) and then leave them on a sunny, frost-free windowsill to let the young shoots (or chits) form.

Potatoes chits after 4 months

Here you can see what to aim for: short, stout shoots, and ideally quite tight and dark; avoid fleshy ones. Then, and very carefully, I place them in the soil, in narrow grooves, or drills, about three to four inches deep and about a foot apart, or a bit more for main-crop varieties. Then cover them with a bank of soil scraped up from either side of your drill, with a pull-hoe or stiff rake (use the back). You’ll probably find that birds, and passing cats, dogs and hares will damage your neat ridges and if that happens ridge them up a few weeks later, ideally just before rain (which will tend to ‘glue’ the loose earth in place).

Seed potatoes in their drill

I usually tap the top of the banks covering the spuds flat, as this allows rain to penetrate better in this dry part of Britain.

You want to get your broad beans planted quite early in the spring to avoid problems in the summer caused by blackfly (like greenfly, they’re sap-sucking aphids), which runner beans are very prone to. So I’m a bit anxious that mine went in so late this year, but having said that, it’s currently far too cold and windy for aphids. So fingers crossed.

Soak your broad beans for at least 2 hours before planting, then I like to add a table-spoonful of ordinary paraffin to the wet beans, immediately before I plant them. This may sound mad, but I was told to do it by an old boy after I’d related how I’d lost 30% of my crop to mice. And I’ve never lost a plant since. Having said that, it’s the sort of thing the bureaucrats in the EC hygiene Gestapo are bound to object to. So don’t mention it to a soul.

Broad beans in their drill

Spread the broad beans evenly across a wide drill and cover with a couple of inches of soil – and make sure they’re all fully buried, or the birds will get them. Then you must keep them watered for at least two weeks. The same goes for your green peas, which I also like to get planted late in March, in normal years. They must be kept wet too (for what it’s worth, I also add a splash of paraffin to them, before planting).

I’ve just been out and taken pics of the beans and the spuds and I have to say I’m delighted by the results so far: germination seems to have been 100% successful. Isn’t growing your own a pleasure? I almost prefer it to writing…

Potatoes after three weeks

Broad beans after three weeks

Of Crowd-funding and Writing

Or should that be: on writing and crowd-funding? In other words, which comes first? I began musing along these lines when I finished Chapter 6 (of 10) in the book I’m currently writing for Penguin. I’d been discussing the impact of the huge and all-encompassing changes that happened in the two centuries on either side of 1500 BC. That was the time when henges, round barrows and other familiar sites and monuments of the Early Bronze Age and later Neolithic went out of use and were replaced by a series of much smaller-scale ritual sites, often associated with water and watery places. Now I don’t want to reveal what the book’s all about – as that might adversely affect sales (and provide free material for some TV documentary-maker to nick) – but as I pushed my laptop to one side and reached across the desk for my nearly-cold mug of tea, made an hour previously, it struck me that the old-style of publishing was a heck of a lot less stressful. Essentially you wrote books and if they sold, you wrote more. And all in all, it was a very relaxing business.

‘Yes, but did you have any contact with your readers?’ I hear a strangled cry from the cheaper seats.

In theory at least, I did, at book-signings in independent booksellers up and down the country, not to mention big events, like Hay-on-Wye, and more recently the excellent festival at Bath. But having said that, I was the one who stood at the front of the room and held forth. The audience listened, respectfully. Essentially I was declaiming; it certainly wasn’t a two-way process. After the talk, I may even have muttered a few well chosen platitudes as I graciously condescended to inscribe their books with my signature… But was it involvement in any meaningful sense of the word? Sadly, I now realise it wasn’t.

The more I have become involved with crowd-funding, the more I realise it’s actually about people. My readers – and what they want. It’s just like the DigVentures excavations. Those digs only work because of the people who take part. Yes, they pay, but they choose to pay. And they buy-in to the whole experience and contribute hugely to the project. And they give of themselves because nobody is ripping them off.  Look, would you expect to be admitted to the English National Opera at Covent Garden, for free, so why should a top-flight excavation be any different? And besides, there will always be ways to go on excavations for free, as a student or young person – just as my books will always be available (and even those published through Unbound) free, at libraries and over the internet.

So maybe in the future writers will have to quit their (award-winning in my case) desks and spend far more time with their readers, either on Twitter, or other social media, or face-to-face at inter-active sessions (rather than ‘lectures’) at places like Hay or Bath. Who knows, maybe purpose-built writers’ pubs and tavern will be built where the interested public could get to meet their favourite (or most loathed) authors? U.S. bookshops are already heading in that direction. No, I honestly don’t think that we’ve even begun to think about the implications that internet-based movements, like crowd-funding, might have on our lives in the future – or indeed on the evolution of urban landscapes.

One final thought: if you’re the sort of lazy, indolent half-wit who is always sponging off your friends and never contributes anything worthwhile to society, then you’re probably reading the correct blog for you. In The Long Run will be right up your street.  But put yourself in my position: how can I possibly fund my detective/thriller if half the crowd who are supposed to be funding it are sitting at home, stuffing their faces with canapés and Champagne while listening to Paul Jones and the Blues Band CDs (I’ll be at one of their concerts on Thursday (May 16th), in the South Holland Centre, Spalding)? I mean how can I possibly succeed in this venture, let along achieve my next goal (60% funding), if everyone continues to sit on their back-sides with chequebooks and cards wedged firmly in their ever-tighter trouser pockets?? So to these people I say: break the habit of a lifetime and subscribe. It’ll change your life, forever. And who knows, we may even get to meet…

A Moment of Reality

I spent three years as a student at Cambridge and never did so many things. I never visited the Fitzwilliam Museum. I never went inside King’s College Chapel. And I never visited Madingley American Cemetery. I soon put the first two right and have been back to both many times since I left college, back in 1967, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I visited Madingley, together with friends from the Wisbech Society. And I’m so glad I went. I won’t say it was fun, because it was more than that; far, far more.

When we arrived it was overcast and windy, but slowly the sun won out and the weather improved. We got out of our mini-bus and slowly climbed the hill up to the great flagpole, flying the Stars and Stripes. It still felt strange to look up at what is essentially a foreign flag. Then we all turned round and there was a spontaneous silence as we were confronted by thousands of white crosses, below which was the grave of a dead person. Each cross carried the person’s name, rank and date of death and I couldn’t help but notice how many airmen died on certain dates in 1942 and ’43 – presumably on those vast thousand bomber daytime raids. And of course heaven alone knows how many crosses they left in their wake in Germany.

Beyond the crosses the land sloped down to the flat fields of the Fens, which spread for about forty miles, across to the Wash and the North Sea. It’s a landscape I know intimately and love dearly, but yesterday afternoon those crosses transcended everything – and, don’t worry, I’m not about to spout stuff about ‘the price of freedom’, or other clichés, but they brought home to me what it means to be human. You can’t avoid inconsistency and lack of logic. Mankind’s world is an irrational place. War is Hell and war is wrong, but sometimes you have to fight to prevent insanity taking over. That’s why those brave men and women died and the evil they fought was clear to all.

But the times we now live in have changed: threats and evils abound, but they are all different and require different answers and different solutions. Grand-sounding concepts like the War on Terror are totally misguided and will achieve nothing, other than to drive desperate people to greater levels of craziness and extremism. When I looked at those crosses I realised that the lessons of history are all-important. Nothing, but nothing, matters more. And if we close our eyes to them, we will be creating vast fields of crosses that would extend to the horizon, and beyond.

Hold Everything! Alan Cadbury Image Discovered

I’ve been trying to find a picture of Alan Cadbury because the nice people at Unbound thought I ought to give him some publicity in my blog, what with Hay-on-Wye coming up and everything. But when it came to looking through all my old film files and more recent digital images, I couldn’t find anything. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. The thing is, he’s notoriously camera-shy. But then I came across this shot taken on a quarry dig in the southern Fens about five years ago. Alan is the one in black, on the right. The two men are standing alongside a beautifully excavated Bronze Age barrow revetment bank (note the fine palaeosol with truncated B soil horizon – so typical of the early second millennium BC in the region).

I think Alan intends to use this picture for his Facebook page. Very unlike him to promote himself like this – but it’s a free world, I suppose. Or maybe someone has put him up to it? Or maybe even he’s using it as a clever ruse in a case he’s working on. I don’t know, but I must admit, I find it all a bit intriguing…