Blogged in the Head

24^th June 2017

I worked something out yesterday; the ash tree is so useful for burning and sounding fresh in a high breeze, it’s no wonder they don’t really catch people’s eye when growing next to a tree of rare beauty, like the redwood, or bonsai. All that pale bark and power-in-numbers foliage, it’s as if they fell out of God’s utility pocket and hit every branch of some other ugly tree on their way down to root.

They know their job though, the spritely bastards are almost kamikaze in their attitude to growing and being chopped up for storage and seasoning. And to be fair, they’re great to look up at when the sun is beating down above them. Of course you’ll always have a chainsaw in your hand and be marking out a cutting point on the trunk when you realise this.

Not me though, not this week. I’ve been watering instead, and I mean real gardeners watering. All week long, that’s pretty much all anyone on my round has said to me. Now I don’t mind that, but it is a minefield of possibility and patience.

Let’s begin with the hose, which if it’s rolled up inside one of those hose rollers, but not adequately fixed to a wall, is going to get messy and be told off. That’s the patience bit. After that I’m in easy spirits, switching at a fancy between the various spray tunings that come with those hose guns. I go for the fully automatic machine gun icon and stand the fuck back until the hose goes kinky and has a panic attack while trying to shut the whole operation down. Perhaps it knows that the house is on a meter; I always think never to ask and just go hell for high water for a good hour.

One of the aforementioned guns came apart at the connector last Friday and the water first attacked me, and then it went for a small electric fence, while I was preoccupied with kicking the connector across the lawn. My shirt got wet, and as I’d recently come off from my tea break, I had to take another one. Good gardening requires a great deal of watching, and that’ll be more of the patience. To get one back on the hose gun, I attached one of those whirly bird water throwers to the hose and did some more watching while the water was flung about to all and sundry without effectively watering anything.

Actually I only got into talking about gardening so that I could mention my new favourite measurement. 2.4mm. I got some new strimming wire and that’s honestly how it was presented on the packaging. Two point four millimetres! Tremendous! Actually, its pretty decent stuff to be fair. It’s yellow.

In other news that’s happened around at my Mum and Dad’s front room, Arthur and I interviewed Antiguan didgeri-drumming sensation, Olugbala Kokumo last night. My folks joined in with the talk, because when you decamp a recording to their house that’s the rule. Arthur brought along his Rickenbacker guitar and I learned something of my own writing techniques during the light chit chat and subsequent yelling across the front room. Big thank yous to those involved, and those who helped to get everyone together; Anna will be editing the results for Cave Mind next week so maybe, y’know, do yourself a favour and have a listen! Attention deficient versions of various lengths will be going up as well!

To each his own is what the drummer says…

JW Bowe xx

P.S! Anna is urging me to find some good weather up at our local golf course so that I can add some peculiar visuals to the deeply informed pro golf commentary that Arthur and have recorded. It’s still raining at the moment. Even my lawn mower is getting grumpy, although that might still be over the frenzied pirouette I performed when pulling the starter cord right out of it. I’ve given it a new one, but we’ll have to wait and see if that is deemed sufficient.

Onwards!