Meat and Two Veg

Potatoes, hot peppers and chives from my garden

I’ve just eaten a meal consisting mainly of veg grown in my back garden. Now I’m waiting to see if I survive.

Cooking doesn’t interest me all that much. My reason for  growing vegetables is more biological curiosity than allotment keeping, so I’m always amazed if I produce anything edible. Today they do seem to be, the meal was actually very nice.

The veg are grown in the same earth where I found the bones (Bones in the back Garden). I like the idea that the flesh on the bones fed the earth that fed the veg which has just fed me.

As long as I don’t think too hard about who the bones were.

I’ve been experimenting with cooking meat recently. I gave up meat almost 20 years ago, shortly after the knife incident in fact (Stalking part5. The Knife).

The new meat curiosity came about because I’m now a dog owner.

As a once long term vegetarian meat is a somewhat curious phenomenon. That thing I’m eating once had a character, it could see, it could feel pain, it may well have come to the gate to say hello to me if I passed it’s field. It’s body matter now becoming my body matter. The recycling of life.

How fascinating!

Normal. But odd non the less.

Could I kill a creature to eat it? Certainly, if I needed to. Given certain circumstances and a detachment. I imagine I could enjoy it. A switching from empathy to consumption.

A farmer near where my parents live calls all his sheep by the same name (Betty I believe) to help prevent him getting attached to any one of them.

Another farm near there kept a lamb. It’s mother had died when it was born so they had  bottle fed it and it became part of the family. They called it Dot.

Then one day the father decided that it was time to eat Dot. They would have her for Christmas dinner.

He prepared the children for this, telling them that this was the cycle of life, things must die and be eaten by other things, that was how life continued.

The mother carefully prepared and cooked the creature, then presented it at the dinner table. The father announced that they were now going to eat Dot the lamb and the mother took the carving knife and cut them each a slice. The two children started eating the meat without a second thought. The mother did the same. The father paused, got up from the table and without a word left the room. He never took a bite of Dot.

Recording of Glass Eye from my Garden

The "patio" where I serve afternoon tea.

As a break from the stalking I’ve been practicing  Glass Eye  this afternoon  in the back garden, with a harmonica and an old plastic flower pot. I’m doing my solo act in Edinburgh at the end of the month, need to get some songs and poems ready.  I’m not sure if I’ll use the flower pot.

I like the sound of the trains in the background on this recording, its the District and Piccadilly lines coming into Barons Court station in London.

About a year ago I found some bones in the garden (The Bones in the Back Garden), I will be bashing these together in Edinburgh. They sound good with the song Sin Eater .

I’m also making up a song about Satan having a beach hut.

Below are some pictures of the garden. Its even more over grown now than it was a year ago, but I have made what could almost be described as a patio. I serve afternoon tea and cakes to guests here. If ever you’re around Barons Court pop in. Monty will be pleased to see you.

My overgrown garden about a year ago

My garden from the same angle now.

Monty

The Ghost of a Dog

Stars. They’re useless! Up there in the sky with that know it all look about them, that “I can tell your future” twinkle. But they can’t! Hot Passion, huh! I had a bad cold and the electricity men hitting things with hammers in my hallway. Rubbish! Then there was that greasy good-for-nothing guitarist Mr Cos, coming round here stealing CD’s, thinking he’s got the right just because they’re his. The cheek! Mr G Avern, my reliable bassist and  Other One, has hand lurgy so he’s no good, he can’t protect the CD’s from Cos. All useless!

At least I have my ghosts:

The Box of Bones

I made the box for the bones found in my back garden. I have only drawn a dog’s skeleton on the top because I don’t want to think of it being a murdered wife or anything. I like this flat I’m now in and love the garden so don’t want them to turn bad against me. It probably was a beloved dog whose flesh has fed my garden, yes I like that. When I die I want to feed other things, to rot, to be eaten, to have the roots of nettles and sycamore trees creeping through my bones. I say sycamore trees because my garden is full of them, the garden must have been a tiny sycamore forest till they were all chopped down, now they’re growing back again with avengence which means at some point I might have to do some gardening.

Interestingly I’ve been having a good hallucination of late. There’s a dog in my flat, a mongrel, very friendly wagging its tail , I bend down to stroke it and it’s gone. I like it though, beats the usual insect and bird monster hallucinations. I did consider that it might be the ghost of the dog whose bones I’ve put in the box. Possible. Or it might be that dastardly part of my brain that does things without my consent deciding that it wants a ghost from the bones and therefore creating one. It does that. The dog vision isn’t as strong today as it has been the last few days, I kind of miss it. I’m still trying to get a real dog though, the lady from Battersea Dogs Home is coming round to inspect my flat on Friday. Worrying. Do they give dogs to people who hallucinate dogs? Perhaps I shouldn’t mention it.

A large rat, a missing cat and a Wednesday night Against Nature.

Monday 10th May 2010

George - my missing cat

I spent most of today making paper in the back garden which should have been lovely but wasn’t. Partly because I kept hoping George would suddenly appear but he didn’t, partly because what did appear was the largest rat I’ve ever seen aside from Stanley Bad.

George is my cat. He got beaten up by one of the local tom cats and has since disappeared. It has been three weeks now.

Stanley Bad is the perverse Lynda Beast replacement in the Rude Mechanicals that turned up as Lynda disappeared behind a beard. He plays violin, saw, trumpet and spoons just as well as Lynda so I’ve agreed to let him stay untill Lynda reappears. However, now I find that he is plotting against me.

I found this out at the Against Nature club opening at the Proud Galleries in Camden. Dickon Edwards is starting this new night every first Wednesday of the month and invited the Rude Mechanicals to play at the launch night. It is a lovely venue, what used to be a horse hospital with the old wood beams still holding up the place, and he booked some excellent acts. I particularly liked the magicians BARRY & STUART, one of them had a wallet with an entrance to hell in it, really, he opened it up and flames burst out. Dickon makes a fine DJ in his silk dressing gown and I think this could become a really good popular night.

Anyway back to the evil plot. Rude Mechanicals had done their soundcheck, gone to a pub to be indecisive about a set list, and were just on the way back to the venue when I heard Stanley trying to steal Tommy G away from me. Apparently Stanley wants to start his own band as a rap artist and reprogramme Tommy G to play hiphop!

Stanley the rat, the evil poisonous mutant! How dare he!

But what am I to do? He woos Tommy with his talk of exotic jazz complications. He says he will be of a higher standard than me. Huh!

That is Stanley Bad for you.

And he can’t do chocolate ads as well as me! Not that I’ve ever done a chocolate ad, but I will and it will be much better than his! Just you wait. If that doesn’t put him in his place him I have a cellar I could lock him in, naked and chained to that giant rat I saw this morning.

(The rat was in the garden, not in the house, but should I still try to get rid of it? And how? Isn’t London flooded with them? It wasn’t in the least bit scared of me, but I think I’m a little bit scared of it!)

The Bones in the Back Garden

Monday 3rd May 2010

Today was a day for considering the bones in my garden.  Why today I don’t know, had planned to make paper from the heap of paper pulp currently festering in my kitchen, but somehow at 2 this afternoon I found myself writing a song about the bones I had discovered.

I moved into this flat a year ago, it’s a nice flat despite sitting on an edge between a massive road and the train line. The nicest thing about the flat is that it has a garden. When I first moved here I had an idea about being a great gardener, but this soon faded as I came to realize the state the garden was in. It was a mess! And underneath all the nettles was junk, bottles, cans, razors, the remains of a mattress, old rotting clothes. You can’t park a car anywhere near my flat so I couldn’t get anyone in to help clear the mess. I temporarily gave up on the idea of doing major work on it and instead decided to have a wildlife garden. Right, I thought, well frogs, and in fact all amphibians, are on the verge of extinction, so what I’ll do is build a pond. I started digging. Then I found the bones.  Lots of them of all different shapes and sizes.

The bones I found buried in the garden

Now when you find things like bones it gets the brain going, wondering what they are from. Are they one creature or many? Are they a pet dog or a person?

The last occupier was a man called Wolfgang. I think he was a nice person, feels like he was, the flat has a pleasent feeling to it. The neighbour says Wolfgang was “a right care in the community case”, he was certainly eccentric, had crammed the place full of gadgets and wires according to the removal men. What had happened to Wolfgang? Had he died? Did Wolfgang know who was buried in the garden?

When Wolfgang had lived here the garden had been very overgrown, the council had come along and chopped some huge trees down. Then there was all the rubbish I’d found, the clothes still on a clothes line buried under a layer of mud with moss growing on them. I started to worry that the place might be haunted, I was living there alone but there was always the feeling of someone else being near. Next band rehearsal I mentioned this to the Rude Mechanicals. Tommy G rather brilliantly wrote the song Wolfgang in which there is a seance and Wolfgang possesses me, but it turns out that he’s a very normal old man who says “I know” a lot and likes chatting with Greta Garbo. This made things seem much better, and now I have a friendly ghost living here with me and the Rude Mechanicals have a fine, rather odd, seance song for the end of The Cyclops & The Wildebeest album.

Back to today. My garden is fascinating! I’ve decided to build a box for the bones. The Bone Box. It is going to be quite lavish, maybe with some gold leaf, and on the box lid I’m going to put a picture of skeletons, one of a dog, one of a cat, and one of a human. And maybe I’ll finish the Back Garden Blues song I started writing at 2, and that can go in the box with the bones. Maybe I should take the box along to a rehearsal to find out what the Rude Mechanicals make of it. But first I must finish the box and wash the bones!

My overgrown garden on Bank Holiday Monday in May