The sun is bright and the sky is an unbroken wash of blue, but there is a hard bite in the air. It is one of those clear crisp January days, and the night had brought a deep frost that the sunshine is still working on. In the lee of the hawthorns the ground is thickly coated in white, like a negative shadow, and every leaf, every blade of grass, is etched out in ice.

I have come to Farlington Marshes, in Langstone Harbour on the coast of Hampshire. This was always my winter patch as a child, where I would come to watch the birds. I was brought up just a couple of miles away, and it was my habit on weekends and holidays, in winter at least, to head down here early, before the dog-walkers arrived, before the short-eared owls had been flushed back to their islands, when I could have the place all to myself, just me and the birds. It is almost shocking how well I remember everything, every brackish pool, every thicket, how familiar it all seems, for it is thirty years since I was last here.

So this is not quite a trip down memory lane for me – that sounds far too leafy and summery and predictable – rather, it is a visit to the mudflats of memory; just intermittently exposed by the turn of unstoppable tides, somewhat sticky and frankly a little foul-smelling. This thick estuarine mud is ripe with life; they say that tidal mudflats support more biomass per square metre than any other habitat on earth save for the tropical rainforest. The coast is the place to be in winter, at least if you are a hungry bird; elsewhere, natural life can feel attenuated, spread a little too thinly, but here it is teeming.

Wild geese pour overhead in thick streams. There must be thousands of them, flying in ropes of twenty or thirty at a time, in constant passage between estuary and marsh, between marsh and farmland, creaking like barn doors as they come in low to land. These are brent geese, burnt geese, and they do indeed look blackened, scorched, like they have been sketched out in charcoals. Perhaps it is the sheer weight of numbers that gives them their apparent sense of security, for it is possible to approach within a few yards of them without interrupting their grazing. Among the flocks on the marshland grass are parties of wigeon, lapwings and godwits, all seemingly emboldened by the confidence of the geese, and the scuts of retreating rabbits, far more wary of me than any of the birds.

The tide is out and the water’s edge is far away. I can pick out the bigger birds, the shelducks and pintails and teal, already seemingly all paired off, and the oystercatchers and curlews, but the small waders that are out there in their thousands are beyond my reach. I have no binoculars with me, and nor do I any longer have the eyes of a thirteen year-old. A curlew starts to curl and then to trill, to babble. This more than anything else is the soundtrack of my youth. It is the sound of ambivalence, of mixed feelings, for it is a call that somehow manages to sound both mournful and joyful at one and the same time.

I pause by the lagoon, with its thick fringe of reedbeds, and remember a colder day than this, long ago, when water rails emerged diffidently from deep cover and stalked across the ice, a kingfisher dashed from post to post in search of somewhere it could fish, and the ducks huddled together and swam in ever-diminishing circles as they tried to keep the last little patch of open water free from the ever encroaching ice.

A small long-tailed bird the colour of desert sand trips over the tops of the reeds. A bearded tit, a bird I would never have seen here as a youngster; the closest I ever saw one was along the coast in Dorset. And there are little egrets poised in the shallows, a much more recent arrival to our shores. It still makes me smile when I see them; after all those times I have seen them as an almost inevitable part of the scenery in the tropics, they still seem wrong to me, but in a good way. If I had seen one here as a child it would have seemed impossibly exotic and out of place, like the flamingo I once came upon in this very pool, an escapee from a wildfowl collection. It is reassuring to think that there have been gains as well as losses. Life never stands still, it ebbs and flows like the tides.
After a couple of hours I come to the end of the path around the marshes, but keep on walking along the harbour edge. The sun is winning now, the frost has all finally cleared and for the first time today my ungloved hands are no longer pinched with cold. I sit on the sea-wall in the sunshine, my feet hanging over the edge, and look out over the approaching channel of water. The tide is coming in fast now, the water rising to wash clean the filigree of tracks in the mud, from the clear trail of goose and shelduck to the faintest spider’s web of dunlin. Out in the flow is a lost fishing float, with a tangle of torn blue netting still attached, and as I watch it drifting by, two little heads pop up from behind it, peer over at me, and then disappear.

Suddenly the channel seems filled with them, a party of overwintering black-necked grebes, elegant little birds that fizz with energy, birds more at home in the water than the air. I count eight of them, with some difficulty, for they are all diving in turn, and seem to spend more time underwater than above it. I watch them for a long time, trying to second guess which will surface next, and where, and being outwitted and outmanoeuvred at every turn. And this is my January moment, sitting on the harbour wall in the winter sun, playing imaginary whack-a-mole with a flotilla of grebes.

Neil’s first book, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills, is published in paperback this week. Copies are on sale in the Caught by the River shop, priced £7.99

By Jasper Winn

I hadn’t counted before just how many years I’ve been coming to this village in Andalusia. But, by going around on my fingers a fair bit, I’ve just worked out that it’s been twenty years since I first walked the sand track into Sanlucar de Guadiana.

Since that first visit the track’s been tarmacked, and there are more cars and less donkeys. There have been two suicides and a murder in recent years. Twice immense floods have washed away boats and pontoons and risen tens of metres up into the villages on both sides of the river. A number of foreigners have moved here, most living self-sufficient lives along the banks of the river. A number of los extranjeros – me included, if only intermittently – are musicians, bringing jazz and acoustic country and rock as counterpoint to the Spanish taste for clattery flamenco and the Portuguese villagers’ love of slow accordion airs. But, really, not that much has changed over the past two decades.

For the past ten years, usually for extended winter periods, I have been lent a friend’s house in the village. It’s where I wrote Paddle; A long way around Ireland, an account of sea-kayaking the thousand miles around Ireland.

There are constants. Yesterday, as always I awoke to a sound like the distant thump of the surf on a beach as Candido, the baker, two doors up the street, started up his kneading machine at four in the morning. It thudded low, slowly and reassuringly through the mud walls of the inter-locked houses. The crabby cockerel next door, almost under my bed, starts crowing then. Often I awake in the night to hear, say, three strokes of the Spanish bells. Two minutes later there will be – just – two answering clangs, softened by distance, from Alcoutim across the river Guadiana.
On the same time-line as Greenwich, Portugal is an hour behind Spain. The river is the border between the two countries and two time zones.

This allows slow time-travel opportunities. By rowing the few hundred yards across the Guadiana – tidal here, some forty miles inland, and tidal still for another thirty miles further until the brackish water hits the rapids at Mertola – I can turn the clock back an hour. So, yesterday I left Spain at ten and was in Portugal for seven minutes past nine, in good time for the market, to buy tiny, plucked quail, ripe plums and fresh vegetables.

After the market I have a couple of coffees, still on the Portuguese side, on the terrace overlooking the river. And then a glass of wine And suddenly – or, really, the opposite of suddenly – I’ve missed the shops back in Spain. Paddle as hard as I might, if it’s 12.59 in Portugal, I’ll arrive back in Sanlucar at 14.05. It’s the downside of time travel. Even Candido will have closed until Monday.

Last night I was out till four in the morning, chatting and drinking and playing music with 50% of the band, The Journeymen, I play harmonica with. Back in Spain I fall asleep in the sun. With the afternoon cooling, in celebration of the autumn that has arrived, I stuff a hammock, sleeping bag, some food and cooking kit into a bag, take my chestnut walking stick and leave the house and the village to walk up-stream. Only a few miles north of here, amongst the steeply rising and falling hills there is a hidden valley that I think of as my outdoor bedroom. A tiny patch of flat ground, a small stream and two wild olive trees just a hammock’s length apart. The last time I slept out here was in late winter on a rare night of frost. Then I’d lain awake, listening to the sonorous booming fog-horn call of an eagle owl.

Now, as I climb the hill there’s a high bubbling sound below me. Bee-eaters. Rising up and down in time with their call on an breeze’s updraught in a ‘V’ of valley running down to the river. And then a dipping, plunging flash of pink and black and white stripes. A hoopoe, Upupa epops. Abubilla in Spanish. All lovely onomatopoeic names which come close to recreating the birds call. But the Arabic hood hood is the closest of all. Close your eyes and say ‘hood hood’ as quickly and as quietly as possible without actually whispering and it’s as if you can hear an actual hoopoe, far away among cork oaks and olives trees.

A hoopoe was my first ‘exotic.’ A bemused, dejected but still flashy little bird walking jerkily like a wind-up tin toy across a sodden field in West Cork, blown to Ireland on an early summer storm. I can still remember, at ten years old, the heart-in-mouth excitement of seeing it and knowing that unlike the dark shapes that ‘might’ have been marsh harriers, or the flash of red that ‘could have been’ a waxwing that the hoopoe absolutely was a hoopoe. Seeing them in Spain still brings me that same thrill.

I’ve always been a bit funny about my interest in birds. I think a lot of people are. You know, reluctant to admit what a source of consolation they are in a pretty messy world; and how just being able to spot and recognise the odd species, and more to watch them going about their lives rather differently from the way we humans go about ours can provide something not far off contentment. But I’m defensive of this. Far more people know about my atheism, dislike of political adherence and how much I drink than know that when I’m feeling a bit glum I will try and get out and watch some bird or other doing something ridiculous, or even uplifting, in the sure knowledge that I’ll then feel better.

Both birds and music – to my mind – are similar. I like both of them in general. But I don’t like – or at least I’m not that gone on – all music, nor, to be honest, all birds. Warblers, for example, are like modern jazz; all pretty much the same, and well to be honest life is brief and there’s many an hour to go before dark. Seagulls, then? Well, they’re modern funk jazz; you think, ‘yeah, i’ve got this,’ i’ve got the beat here,’ one likes the general idea but then it all founders on those first and second year immatures and the extended sax solos, and one realises that seagulls are just modern warblers but bigger and louder.

Birds of prey, on the other hand – my thing, ‘because I like to keep things simple – are rock music. An eagle aloft is Led Zeppelin; not subtle but bloody exciting. A peregrine stooping is a Hendrix solo. The dexterous weaving of a spar’hawk along a hedge is Rory Gallagher extemporising Celtic blues on the fly. Even a kestrel hovering is Peter Frampton.

Meanwhile, on a provocative note, there’s all those people keen to chase down the rarities and storm-blowns and shouldn’t-be-here-at-alls. That’ll be the ornithological equivalent of the Last Night of the Proms, then. A bunch of dafties gathering around something small and fragile – Land of Hope and Glory, say, sheltering in a bush in a garden on the Isle of Wight – and participating it to death.

And then, there’s the exotics. Country music, in my book. An umbrella that covers everything – from the very good to the very bad – from Dolly Parton to the Dartford warbler. From Randy Travis to the magpie? From white-tailed sea eagles to Gram Parsons. And all the odd-balls in the wrong genre or habitat, giving it their best shot. Or at least surviving. Ringo singing Act Naturally? Leonard Cohen and the Buckskin Boys? Bob Dylan – triumphantly – in Nashville? Little Egrets? Red Kite? Fulmars?

Here, in Andalusia, on the Guadiana, the exotics are not the bee-eaters, nor hoopoes, nor egrets but the garden birds of further north scratching a living down in the hot Iberian sun. In the village there are jolly house sparrows up in the eaves and around the café tables. But, still, it always sounds slightly wrong to hear the tschk tschk of a great tit flitting through the hot bushes of Andalusia, especially when one has seen them equally cheerful in the depths of a Swedish winter at 30 below atop six feet of snow. The alarmed skirl of a blackbird and a quick black darting shadow between one bush and another, seems discordant, too. Today it’s the sudden, and unlikely, scattering of long-tailed tits that fly into the tree above my head as I rest for a few minutes in its shade and scurry around, laddering from one twig to another, peeking and pecking under leaf after leaf before, as suddenly, flying off again.

Crossing the hill I leave the sun to walk through the shade following a fire-track round the contour line, and then branching off down into the hidden valley. Within twenty minutes I’ve strung my hammock between the two trees. For the last days it’s been unsettled, with thunder storms and rain and whirling winds, but tonight it looks and feels set fair so I don’t bother to stretch the bivvy-tarp above my bed. There’s clear water in the tiny stream. If I’d known I wouldn’t have lugged a couple of litres from the house along in my pack.

I unfold a Vargo wood stove. A tiny, ounces-light joy that unfolds from flat into a hexagonal cone, like some kind of titanium origami. An open fire would be lovely but the vegetation is tinder dry here and the Vargo is the solution. I became an aficionado of wood-stoves on the trip around Ireland. My fancy mountaineers petrol stove didn’t stand up to the brutal treatment of sea and rain and storm and neglect, and I finished the last five hundred miles cooking on driftwood burnt in a tin-can. Once you’ve done that why would you go back to anything less simple? With wood-stoves there’s always fuel to burn, nothing to go wrong and the real joy of tending a living fire. Playing with fire is still a delight.

I have an Opinel pocket saw to make a pile of four inch, finger-thick dead olive sticks. I stuff the stove with dried grass and twigs before showering sparks into it from a flint and steel. Within a few minutes, just as darkness falls, the flames are lighting up a small circle around me and throwing everything else into shadow. There’s silence again apart from the frogs burping and hiccuping, and crickets and cicadas chirruping. An insistent ‘beeyp,’ beeyp,’ like sonar picking up small random shapes in the dark, starts up; the call of Scops owls. Like the bells of the villages or Candido’s bread-kneader, the Scops owls continue for long periods on and off during the night but are lulling rather than intrusive.

The fire dies down as I eat and there is only a faint glow from the embers. I sit back and swing in the hammock and sip wine from my horn beaker. It’s a present, thoughtfully chosen by someone who knows me well, perhaps too well. After only a few weeks’ of use it’s become a part of my ‘fixtures and fittings.’ I’ve never owned a house. I spend much of each year travelling on horse or by foot, or in kayaks. When I do settle, it’s for a few months of writing, or working wherever there’s a haven. In the past two years alone, I’ve spent half a year in Patagonia working with horses and guiding long distance trips, many winter months in the north of Sweden, and two long stays here in Andalusia, interspersed by a few months house- and dog-sitting in England. And it’s been like that since I was sixteen. So, these small things – a particular knife, my leather notebook case and Waterman ink pen, a pair of Blundstone boots and now this horn cup – are my simple chattels and they are the tangible pleasures that go with the more abstract pleasures of actually doing things, that enhance the physicality of life. Like, now, lying in my hammock under the half moon, and the not-so-bright stars.

There’s a sudden huffing on the far side of the stream. Where I threw the bones from the my lamb chop into the bushes, something is snuffling and smelling them out. I can see nothing more than a shadow, ten yards or so away. I pick up the torch. Aim. Snap it on. Caught in the beam is a large boar. Dark and shag-haired. Eyes reflecting red in the beam. A moment’s stillness, and then he spins round. A single crash of over-run bushes and he’s gone.

The night is measured out by the Scops owls ticking and tocking. A chill breeze starts up and I climb into the bag. Even then I’m not over-warm. There’s no eagle owl tonight. At sunrise I get up and set fire in the stove to boil up water for coffee. I splash my face in the stream amongst the frogs.

Sitting on a rock I sip my coffee from a titanium mug – if I have a fetish, a weakness or an affectation it does seem to be titanium; do people make titanium shoes? Underwear? Hats? I don’t know. But if they do, then obviously I want them.

I hear a sibilant whistle high above, from behind the hill. Repeated. Over and over. Then a cruciform shape, but with the arms bent back at the wrists and its ragged splayed fingers twisting, sweeps in overhead and back out of sight. I’m almost sure it’s a Bonneli’s eagle. A lightly barred tail, a white underside, a russet collar and those wide, bent back wings. I do that birders thing of questioning myself like a severe cross-examining council. Why do I think a Bonneli’s? How about a buzzard – one of several species to chose from? An immature Imperial? Or a booted, or short-toed or spotted eagle?

The same whistling, wheedling bird suddenly swings back over the hill side, this time wings held out straight as it goes with the breeze. And is joined by another, similarly marked and shaped, but silent. I get a long look at both of them. I note stuff. As one should. And it doesn’t help a bit. I still think Bonneli’s eagles. But know I could be wrong. Even very wrong.

Warmed by the sun, coffee-sipping, contemplating the few minutes needed to untie my hammock, disassemble my bedroom and walk the hour of tracks back to the village, I realise that one of the pleasures of life sometimes lies in not knowing something. In being curious and hopeful and interested. But not too knowledgeable. And that makes me happy.

Paddle by Jasper Winn is now on sale in the Caught by the River shop, priced £7.50

Jeff Barrett

Books:

Waterline by Ross Raisin
The Hunger Trace by Edward Hogan (“Spiky roadkill blemished Brian Clough Way. They drove out from under the weather, the clouds like blue ink from a black ink pen, petroleum rainbows climbing up the spray”)

But my favourite is City of the Dead by Sara Gran, a thriller, in fact the best hard-boiled thriller that I’ve read in years. I’m indebted to the publisher, Angus Cargill at Faber & Faber, for sending me a copy of this book because I’m not sure I’d have picked it up otherwise. The cover is such a ‘mystery novel’ cliché that I fear it mightn’t find the audience it needs to start the word spreading; which would be a real shame because what’s inside is hip, complex and unique. Hopefully it will get the recognition it deserves and the cover will help it shift millions in airport bookshops around the world.
In a nutshell: Set in New Orleans. A female detective is hired to find a guy that’s been missing believed dead since Katrina trashed the place and destroyed the lives of those who live there. So far, so straight, but here’s the deal: Claire DeWitt, is a damaged, drugged-up, I-Ching rolling private eye, coming along in 2011, she sits pretty neatly alongside contemporary anti-heroines Sara Lund (The Killing) and Laure Berthaud (Spiral). Her quest to find this missing guy is mentally assisted by a book called Detection, the only book written by French detective, Jacques Sillette. This book informs her life, and as it happens several of those around her. (So, what we, the readers, get is a book within a book. If that sounds complicated, it isn’t, but I know if I try to explain it, it will be. Trust me, it works. In fact, Detection is brilliant and I can’t help but wonder if Sara Gran has written it as a whole book. Hope so).

New Orleans is ever present and she writes about the place and it’s characters with a real fondness, but one that is informed by anger at just how corrupt and fucked up the place has become. This quote kind of sums it up:

“People kill each other everywhere. The difference was that in New Orleans, no one tried to stop them. The cops blamed the DA and the DA blamed the cops. The schools blamed the parents and the parents blamed the schools. White people blamed black people and black people blamed white people. In the meantime, everyone went on killing each other.”

Dark days, and obviously this book isn’t a laugh a minute, but if you have ever enjoyed the masters of late twentieth century crime writing – Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, Charles Willeford – or the aforementioned TV dramas (plus The Wire), you are seriously going to dig this. (it’s on sale from our shop, priced £9.00)

I also recommend a regular visit to the Abbott Gran Old Tyme Medicine Show. A blog that SG does with fellow author Megan Abbott.

Music:

Love this. What a band.

True Soul Volume 1 and True Soul: Deep Sounds From the Left of Stax (both on Now Again/Stones Throw)
Two collections of rare and mindblowing Southern soul & funk, including DVDs featuring live footage.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of Jack Nitzsche, an artist that still manages to take my breath away. Highly recommended are the two Hearing Is Believing comps on Ace, but I’ve been particularly enjoying his soundtrack to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, from which I’ve lifted this track:

And it hasn’t all been about staying in either. As previously reported, Port Eliot was a blast but so was our night at The Stag in Hampstead on July 6th. Martin Noble and Luke Turner talking Sea Power and Moor walking, Rob Penn, Nick Hand and the hilarious Mike Carter talking bike made for a really good evening of top entertainment. Plus, The Stag proved to be the best venue yet. The Caught by the River Social club has found a new home. Watch this space.

Laugh:

This month, Hannah-Lou tells us how it was….

On the second of July my husband and I find ourselves in a grubby nightclub called Stix in Kirkcaldy, on the Northern shore of the Firth of Forth. We’re trying not to talk too loudly in our English accents, as the rowdy crowd have just stood up and booed the national anthem as David Haye entered the ring on the big screen. We’re in Fife for the last night of our Scottish tour to celebrate our album release, and are supposed to be playing a gig in a dingy backroom of a karaoke pub a few miles away. But the headliner, and his local audience, didn’t turn up, so the promoter has driven us into town to watch the boxing instead. He seems to know everyone in Stix, and shouts abuse at most of them for promising to come to the gig and watching the boxing instead. We’re pleased. This is much more fun. Twenty-four hours earlier we skipped soundcheck in Ullapool to witness our other British sporting hopeful of the summer bow out of Wimbledon, so the feeling of disappointment when Haye loses is nothing new.

The following afternoon we trace the outlines of Lowry paintings in the architecture of Berwick Upon Tweed, having just played at a small local festival. The timid landlord of our B&B greets us by apologising for being rushed, saying that he had to go out and ‘deal with something one of the other guests had done’. He presses a neatly wrapped parcel of local cheese into my hand as we say goodbye the following morning, and we spend the long drive back to Kent dreaming up ideas of what the guest did. The cheese stinks. We hate cheese.

My husband is a man who can never be idle. So, just as I’m looking forward to a rare few days of leisure before we start an Irish tour with Fionn Regan, he decides that now is the time that we should make a video for our new single. As usual, we wait until my parents are out or asleep to transform their living room into our studio, then spend hours talking through the logistics of how we’re going to get Trevor’s idea to work. The film itself takes three minutes.

We have our happiest two weeks of the year in Ireland, and are grateful to Fionn for giving us the opportunity to really explore the country. He’s chosen some beautiful venues to play in, and of course has a great audience, but we’re overwhelmed by the crowds’ nature to really listen to the words of songs, reacting as if they were at a poetry reading or comedy club rather than at a concert. Every night we have a queue of people wanting to discuss lyrics with us.

Travelling and sleeping in our 1977 Sherpa campervan for the entirety of the tour means we really feel that we get to know the place, and it’s our days off at small campsites that give us our best memories. We go fishing for the first time in a lake just west of Dublin. We catch five fish and send a picture to Andrews of Arcadia, who tells us at least one of them is a Rudd. Trevor’s beaming with joy. We stay in Doolin and get the ferry to Inisheer, one of the Aran Islands. One campsite later in the week doesn’t feel right, and when we notice that the neatly cut grass boxes in every other campervan, and rises overgrown around the too long stationary wheels, we decide to move on.

We walk back from an arcade in Galway at two in the morning on our penultimate evening, carrying a weird looking pink rabbit and a green baseball cap that Trevor’s just won from a claw machine, and see two kids jumping off a concrete diving board into the pitch black waters of Galway bay. Trevor decides that he has to swim there in the morning before we leave for our last show in Dublin. When the morning comes the weather has turned, and he remembers that he hates swimming. But he’s said it now so we have to go. Afterwards I make beans on toast and tea in the van to warm him up, and he’s glad he went.

At five the next morning we’re disembarking the ferry at Holyhead after a great last show with Fionn, and we start the long, 45mph journey to Port Eliot festival. We have a beautiful, relaxed evening, sitting by the lake with friends fishing, and catching up with everyone in the Caught by the River tent after our set. We’re sad to have to leave early the next morning, but we’d only do it for one other festival. At Truck we have one of this year’s real highlights- we become the ‘Truck Allstars’ last thing on Sunday night, joining our friends who run the festival The Dreaming Spires, Romeo, Angela and Michele from the Magic numbers, Sarah from St Etienne and George Borowski to perform Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ in its entirety. It goes down really well. We even have a short interval in between Side A and Side B.

With one week left of the month, we stop off in London to record a George Harrison cover for a Mojo tribute cd. We have a family picnic in a London park where we take our nephews rowing on a lake. On our final weekend before home we play at Kendal Calling and Cambridge Folk festival. They’re too crowded. We’re longing to be back at St Germans with a pint of Wandle.

Quality First, Last & Forever, the new album from Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou is out now. Vinyl and CD copies can be found in the Caught by the River shop.

Catch Trevor & Hannah on tour. Check their website for info.

This is the month that I’m supposed to be telling you all about the fish that I caught on my return to the riverbank after the three month closed season but I’m afraid that story is for another day, simply because I have yet to make the return. And you know what makes that so daft? Aside from the best part of a week spent at Glastonbury I’ve been too busy doing this, Caught by the River, to get time out to go. Four years ago, when our love of fishing inspired Andrew and I to start a blog in the first place, that was not part of the plan, but I’ll tell you what, I’m not complaining (much). Our book turning up on June 16th has given me enough pride and pleasure to realise what a good decision we made back in 2007. I am overjoyed to say the least. It really is a case of who’d have thought it.

Aside from On Nature another book I can also recommend this month, is Fire Season: Field Notes From A Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors. Connors had me fascinated as he tells what he sees from his observation tower in New Mexico’s Gila wilderness and joins the dots between Aldo Leopold and Jack Kerouac with a subtle nod to Thoreau – “Every day in a lookout is a day not subtracted from the sum of one’s life.” It’s a good read and it’s out in the UK in September. Review to follow.

On the turntable is the new Gillian Welch record and it’s a thing of real beauty. Warpaint knocked me out when I saw them for the first (and second) time at Glastonbury and my mind was properly blown by this young guy, Michael Kiwanuka, when I walked in on his sold out gig at The Social a few weeks ago having no idea of who he was. He’s jaw to the floor good and I cannot recommend you see him loudly enough.

Laugh of the month came about at Glastonbury, in the company of mates Carl Gosling and James Endeacott. 3am on Thursday, when I asked if they knew what was causing the occasional burst of cheer followed by absolute quiet, I was told it was the ‘silent disco’. Somehow, I got the wrong end of the jazz fag and this became a gathering of deaf people. You probably had to be there. I’m glad I was. Over and out.

Jonny Trunk

Emails from Jonny Trunk never fail to hit the spot. The last one – offering up the Stand By For Adverts/Barry Gray compilation his label Trunk were releasing – asked you to send cash along with a crude drawing of anything from a Gerry Anderson telly show to a Colonel Des Buttocks somewhere near Brick Lane (I drew something crap from Terrahawks in my daughter’s crayons). This time round… well, I’ll let him explain: “It’s called the MMs Bar recording, which is actually pronounced “EMs”, and was made in 2007 / 2008 by an woman called Sandra Cross. She recorded all the buffet car announcements on the Midland Mainline train from Leicester every time she got on it. I first heard it on Resonance FM very early one morning in the car and it really made me laugh and think. I decided it needed to be made into a record. So that’s what I did.” I am working on a picture of a British Rail sandwich to go with the cash I’m about to send to Des The Fat Controller.

We’re really excited about the fact that Jonny will be DJing at Port Eliot with us next month – worth the admission price alone.

The Horrors ‘Moving Further Away’

I love bands like the Horrors. They’re part of that all-to-rare group of artists, the ones who evolve from sketchy beginnings into something far more interesting, far weirder than anyone ever had the right to ever expect. Bands with a healthy amount of ambition. Skying, their new album, is being eulogized about in all the right places – rightly so too. It’s a massive step on from their last LP, managing to weld Kraut to ’80s synth-sounds to garage rock. At around eight and a half minutes, Moving Further Away could easily go on for twice as long. It’s a truly stunning record. Cannot wait to hear what happens next.

You can listen here to a stream of Skying via the Quietus.

Iain Sinclair “Ghost Milk”

I’ll be writing a lot more about this in the next week or two, just editing down an hour long interview I did with Iain last week. The follow up to his hugely successful book on Hackney, Ghost Milk ponders age of (and death of) the Grand Project – from the Millennium Dome to the Olympics. Blackly humorous and oddly trippy at points, it’s as fantastic as you’d expect. Interviewing the guy – well, he doesn’t let you down in person. More on that in a week or so.

The Craft Beer Co.

Well, the other night I caught either a glimpse of heaven or a snapshot of the place that would finish me off – possibly both. The Craft Beer Co opened up with thirty seven casks and kegs on at once – a veritable beer festival every day of the week. I met the Beer Advent Calendar man – this site’s very own Ben McCormick – there for a quick beer on the way home; four pints later I escaped with a considerably looser grip on reality. Their house beers are staggeringly good, their taste in guests (the 35 other pumps) is impeccable. Can’t recommend this place highly enough. That’s the grave stone written, right there.

Robin

by Tracey Thorn.

It’s Fathers’ Day, and my sister and I have brought my Dad on a little holiday, down to Salcombe in Devon. We’re staying at a boutique hotel on the beach. The guy who carries our bags says that Rod Stewart was here last week, but he may be pulling my leg. On the beach there’s an old fashioned sea tractor, a contraption resembling a Victorian bathing machine, which drives you out across the sand and into the sea, where it docks with the tiny ferry taking you into Salcombe. It’s a breezy day, and the tide is going out, meeting the waves coming in from the mouth of the estuary, and so creating a heavy swell. We are supposed to be looking after my 86 year old Dad, and treating him to something special for Fathers’ Day, and yet here he is, with his collapsible walking stick, having to clamber from the back of a ricketty wooden cart onto a heaving and pitching boat, in order to go on a river cruise. Fortunately he survives the first part of the journey, and from Salcombe we take the larger ferry that cruises up the estuary to Kingsbridge.

It’s a beautiful trip. The landscape here is dramatic. Dark green heavily wooded hills drop down to the very edge of the sea, looking almost tropical when the cloud is low and hangs like a heavy mist on the top of the hills. A little further up though, the land softens, and the fields are more gently undulating. There’s a stiff breeze, and it races across the fields, ruffling the long grass like the fur on a dog’s back, and sending the cloud shadows racing along as if in a sped-up film. The trees which overhang the sea have their lower branches trimmed, otherwise they dip into the salt water and gradually wither and die. The greenery is cut in a dead straight line, making the woods look like a Vidal Sassoon haircut, all smooth curves on the top, and sharp lines around the edge. And these neatly coiffured trees have become the home for great numbers of white egrets, and grey herons, who perch elegantly in the branches, unwittingly killing off the leaves below as the salt water drips from their wings. Further along, on the sandy bank, are two families of shelducks, one with six little ducklings, and the other with thirteen, all thriving in this safe spot where their only predator is the seagull. We pass the house where Tony Soper used to live, in obvious splendid isolation, the only approach to the house being from the water or across a couple of huge fields.
Next day my sister and I decide to set off on a walk along the coastal path. It starts off well, the path leads through trees, and the obvious steep drop to one side is hidden. Gradually the path opens out though, and the sheer edge becomes all too obvious. Far below, the sea is crashing onto the rocks, and up here on the narrow ledge all conversation has died out. “You’re a bit like me, aren’t you?” I begin tentatively. “Not all that mad keen on sheer drops?”
“I AM HATING IT”, comes the reply from behind me. Gratefully, we turn back, determining to set off across the fields instead, and so approach Bolt Head from inland, thus getting the view without the vertigo. It was the right decision. This path, across National Trust owned fields, and all clearly signposted at every corner, is glorious, and makes its way through meadows of wild flowers, taking steep dips and sharp climbs as it heads towards the cliff. The sound of birdsong is everywhere, finches suddenly startle as we pass and burst up into the sky in mini-explosions. The last climb up to the cliff is too steep for us, we get halfway and scramble back down. Then make our way back to South Sands where we started, only to retrace our steps again as we realise we’ve gone wrong. We’ve walked miles, and many of those miles have been us turning back on ourselves because the path was either a) too steep b) too scary or c) the wrong path altogether. It’s a sort of Random Rambling. There’s a goal in sight, but it should never be allowed to spoil your actual enjoyment of the walk.

by Travis Elborough.

May Day. A holiday and a distress signal. Were, I found myself wondering recently, the pagan rites of this ancient seasonal celebration so distasteful to this isle’s Christian usurpers, that they maliciously set about repurposing its name for maritime disasters and, later, free falling airplanes? Probably. Edward Woodward as Sergeant Howie, predictably, sprang to mind. And at this time of year, the watching of The Wicker Man surely seem almost as much of a May Day ritual as the rituals of May Day themselves. All of these thoughts were churned up by being on the Kent coast this month. I’d gone ostensively to visit the new Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate. But as the paperback of my book about the seaside had just come out, I also decided to undertake a kind of secular pilgrimage to nearby Kingsgate Castle.

Set above Kingsgate Bay, whose eroded grey-white chalk cliffs have the look of a severely gnawed wedding cake, the Castle is an 18th century mock fortress with several later additions and long since divided up into private flats. It was, however, the coastal residence of Sir John Lubbock. A classic frock-coated, full-bearded Victorian philanthropist, Lubbock was a banker, cricket fan, amateur biologist and the Liberal MP for Maidstone. A free-thinker in the vain, say, of Lord Summerisle’s grandfather, he grew up with Charles Darwin as a near neighbour. Spurred on by the evolutionist, he went on to write several books on the natural sciences, among them an influential study of ants, bees and wasps. (Mining bees and digger wasps are plentiful in this corner of the North Kent. Their presence confirmed by the hundreds of tiny bore holes that pockmark the cliffs at Reculver, a bay or so over at Herne.)

As a parliamentarian, Lubbock was behind a slew of progressive measures that included securing a reduction of the working week for shop staff and helping to establish public libraries. A passionate advocate of voting reform he also founded The Proportional Representation Society back in 1884. If his own party are now complicit in the (likely) destruction of the very libraries he fought to create and his dreams of a more representative parliament were busily being dashed as I was clambering along the beach, spotting sandpipers and ringed plovers, then another of his innovations, the Bank Holiday, has been almost unavoidable this spring. But it was the masses that mattered to Lubbock. His Bank Holiday Act of 1871, initially drafted to ensure that inky-fingered Bob Cratchetts up and down the land, got at least four days off a year, can be seen as the making of the seaside as we know it. So many of its most quintessential elements – from eating fish and chips (a dish hailing from the metropolitan backstreets) to paddling in the shallows (a neat way of avoiding bathing fees)- only arrived in the wake of bank holiday-making trippers.

Lubbock, fittingly perhaps, died in Kingsgate in 1913. I toasted his achievements with a pint in the Captain Digby, the pub on the cliff top historically frequented by smugglers, and looked in vain for turnstones around the bay before heading to Margate.

In the Turner and contemplating Turner’s The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, an astonishing painting of a darkly satanic volcano spurting jets of molten lava, I recalled coming to Margate five or six years ago for Artangel’s Exodus event. Standing on a piece of wasteland beside the sorely decrepit Dreamland amusement park, I’d watched as a giant wicker man designed by Antony Gormley was set alight, the flames quickly rippling through the wood and casting an eerie orange glow over the assembled crowd. My memory is a little shaky but I am sure that happened in May. What it also sparked was the idea that perhaps I should write something about the seaside, about its darkness and its light, its sublimity and its ridiculousness. But then I guess, it’s a fertile time of year.

…
Jonny Trunk, that modern antiquarian of library music and film scores and a man who knows how to wear a knitted tie, issued Paul Giovanni’s soundtrack to The Wicker Man in the late 90s. His own new single for Ghost Box’s Study Series, Animation and Interpretation, arrived just before I left for Kent. Its two instrumental tracks, La Traine Fantome and Cardboard Boxford, stuffed with cranky analogue samples, feel almost crafted in sticky-backed plastic.

Perhaps even better, though, was its accompanying series sibling from Hintermass. The a-side Are You Watching, in particular, mines a vein of whoozy, melancholy English pastoral pop brilliance that has lain dormant since Julian Cope abandoned his turtle shells for SS caps.

Travis’s book, Wish You Were Here: England on Sea is out now in paperback and on sale in the Caught by the River shop, priced £8.50

‘Elborough is an English nostalgist in the mode of John Betjeman… as a cultural commentator [Elborough] is a terrific companion… Wish You
Were Here is quirky, chatty, charming and optimistic – an ideal read for the English beach.’ Sunday Times

myspace.com/traviselborough
And if you have time to waste… here are some snaps flickr.com/photos/mylifeinlomo/

The Pleasures of an April in Arcadia have been many and almost overwhelming. This year’s explosion of blossom made the winter a memory once and for all. Down every lane, along every avenue in London and especially outside John Betjeman’s house on Highgate West Hill you could see it by day and smell it by night. Through it the birds sang as if conducted by Sebastian Faulks on ecstasy and an owl that lives in an oak on the edge of the Heath joyously hunted rats with deathly shrieks.

The month began with a performance at the Slaughtered Lamb Public House on Great Sutton Street by the high art form that are Goldsmiths’ allumni Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou. They played songs from their forthcoming long player ‘Quality First, Last and Forever!’ as they will be doing elsewhere in the coming weeks and months and if you do only one thing this year, go and see them. It is like seeing the love children of Billy Childish and Sandy Denny perform songs from the secret songbook of Winston Smith and Julia. See them now before they go on Later and the world at large takes them away from you. See them in the meantime on a film someone made during their January show at the Kilburn Tin Tabernacle and uploaded onto You Tube.

Beyond that much else was celebrated: the Feast of the Car Boot Sale a.k.a the Easter Bank Holiday Extension, a growing addiction to the organ breaks and seaside town melancholy of Metronomy, the pouring of gallons of tea, the drinking of yards of ale and evenings of double episodes of Spiral on BBC4. Auction catalogues were read by day and the fiction of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo by night. My jeans were patched by the Empress of Arcadia and delivery was taken of a pair of Blue Serge Dreadnought Trousers from Old Town. Books were found for the Lost Library of Angling and plans made for the ‘World of Andrews of Arcadia’ as Port Eliot felt like a reality each time the sun shone. I dined on hot cross buns baked by the Empress, did one thousand miles and more on English roads looking for Vintage Fishing Tackle for the Soul and got loaded at the opening of John Richardson’s exhibition of new work at the Tinsmith’s Gallery in Ledbury.

On a blazer of a day in Bethnal Green I had my haircut in the style of Eric Blair meets Edward Fox Uptown by Mr. Natty and spent a night out with the Sideshow crew at the opening of their exhibition at Rough Trade whilst wasting the hours in between watching the carp getting ready to spawn in Highgate No. 1 Pond. I spent Thursdays at Spitalfields and ended the month driving to Norfolk to stall out at a car boot sale on the day of the Royal Wedding.

Oh yes, in Arcadia during the month of April we put the clocks back and had pleasure.

Metronomy ‘The Look’
Don’t know much about this band, got sent the new record ‘The English Riviera’ and was drawn to this track – a kind of end-of-the-pier Bontempi soul record. The video features some really mental looking puppets of sea birds. Sold.

New Statesman
Guest editors usually bring out the worst in magazines. Invariably those ‘special’ editions nosedive toward the recycling bin before you’ve even finished the opening letter. Annie Lennox does the Observer magazine? Nah, you’re alright there. The idea of Jemima Khan putting together an issue of New Statesman didn’t exactly fill me with excitement, especially considering the roll they’re been on with recent events. Against odds, it’s ace. Khan has put together the perfect blend of pop culture and political insight. Julian Assange on why the elite have always hated the radical press; Russell Brand with a reasoned and hilarious piece on his own spirituality and Richard Dawkins; a document of Hugh Grant’s jaw dropping evening where he goes for a drink with a News International whistleblower and tapes the conversation; Jarvis on the New Labour hangover and an interview by the temporary editor with Nick Clegg (it’s the one where he recounts how his kids ask why everyone hates him). It all comes wrapped in covers by both Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst. It’s a really brilliant issue of an always worthy read.

Lauren Laverne and The Adam & Joe show on 6 Music
Lauren‘s show never features anything less than perfect music. Last week featured Pentangle, The Fall, Stereolab and The Zombies ). Just perfect radio – and I’m not just saying that because she had us on there last week (she featured Caught By The River forty minutes into her Wednesday show, it’s still on the iPlayer). In the same slot on Saturday – returning to the airwaves not a moment too soon – are Adam & Joe. You either love ‘em or you’re not arsed, I’m not sure I could convince anyone either way. Personally, I adore them. They’ve made the Saturday morning hangover slot bearable.

The Walking Dead
I raved about this when it was broadcast on FX last year. As of tonight (10/4/11), the six part series screens on Channel 5. Cannot recommend it highly enough.