THE MOOSE THAT COOKED HIS FOOT

Dug out some old notes from the boat yard. Always meant to write them up but sorta like how they tumble about like a bad dream.

“Nights indistinguishable from days - the water has eroded the boundary. It used to be that my days were water-free, then at night I’d have the rust dreams, now I still have the dreams but my days are the same. Perfect entropy: water up the D-Bar, across the bad weld, into the boat and straight into my sleeping skull. Today we sat around the bleeding heart that is my three cylinder lister engine and tried to work out which of the gaskets had blown. Then someone brought up the topic of rust again and we went with that. I think we all knew we were really talking about death because Clacton Mick said he’s heading for the ‘dirt sleep’ - his lungs are on the way out (“when did I have that scan Russ?” “Bout two weeks ago Mick"). Sacrificial Mike’s heading to Hertford (“I’m on the H2H mate”). Can’t remember why we call him that. Only 4 miles but he doesn’t want to go. Always pushing upriver. He’s on/off with Kay. One night the storms were brewing, you could see the thunderheads on the horizon and you just knew they were about to have a massive argument… it always went with the weather. We’ve seen it before so everyone headed in early and sure enough 3am came and Mike was screaming… chucking stuff out of their boat and into the yard. Had moored next to them during lockdown but didn’t know them. He told me he’s so glad he chose this side of the river “that side is a trap” (that was the side with mortgages).. He moans about boats by day, but counts his blessings by night. I prefer him when the sun’s gone down. Pau the welderl: “I give up on boats. Doesn’t know how this didn’t sink.” We raised the gas locker holes. Why the hell are they down there? Just like the nightmare. List before. List after. Unknown unknowns. Why did I even bother making a list? Have I learnt nothing?? I really should just have gone there and said well let’s see what awfulness I discover when I poke around a bit. Another feller been hanging around, think I met him in the chandlery “Call me Moose, everyone does.” I went around asking for Moose who had the keys to the warehouse so I could lock up the pressure washer. “Moose? Moose? No one here by the name of Moose.” Apparently he’s called Dave. No one’s ever called him Moose. I found out today he steam-cooked his foot with a hot pressure washer and had to go to hospital. Oucha.”

Zen and the Art

“I’ve wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn’t see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.” - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig, 1974. 

Wild Goose Narrowboat Rennovation. 2015 to present. Ongoing project for the hands and mind. Though now, at long last, a home. 

Upstream Expedition Diaries. Extract. Expedition #4. Feb ’19.

I was on my own this time; partly freeing, partly terrifying. I’d cleared the week, and given myself a couple of spare days beside. Some additions to the kit: a personal locator beacon and a hot water bottle, not for me, but for the batteries. Braemar had been the coldest place in the UK for two consecutive nights (-14) and even parts of the Linn itself had frozen over: huge slab-shards of ice butting up against each other. 

The goal more focussed this time: to film in Garbh Coire and at the foot of the falls of Dee... the only part of the river that had resisted all attempts to film it. I’d been playing the shot in my mind for months. I settled on these few days because the weather fronts were timed to pass over during the nights, leaving clear days. 

After a fun night in Bob Scotts I woke early to sort the kit, leaving behind as much as I could. My ability to assess what was necessary improved by aching shoulders after just 90 mins of walking. Set off with the aim of getting to Corrour by lunch and Garbh Refuge by the evening. That would give me two days in Garbh Choire to wait for the weather window get the sequence. 

The first part of the walk was manageable as I was following in someone’s tracks. Then at Lui Beg bridge the tracks stopped - I could see they returned the way they’d come. Day walkers? Or was it too tough walking in the fresh snow? I was about to find out. 

From Glen Lui to get into the Lairig I head round the Forest of Mar; the bare, treeless bulge at the foot of Carn a’Mhaim. This was a slog like no other: wading through thigh-deep snow headlong into a howling gale. It wasn’t technically snowing but it felt like it: the wind whipping clouds of spindrift into my face. Hard to breathe. Snow devils danced around me and I donned the artic gear: balaclava and ski mask. I consoled myself with the thought that this was the lee side of the hill, and the slope would be scoured on the other side. I’d make up the lost time there. But I was wrong. 

One of our guides on a previous expedition used a kind of traffic light system to asses how safe we were at a given point. Discomfort wouldn’t nudge the light to amber but a lost glove would send us straight to red. I’ve always remembered that so when it came to checking the map I tied them securely to my walking poles. 7km to go, 3 hours in. Garbh is out. New plan: Corrour and reassess. 

Spotted another snow devil barrelling straight towards me so I lent into it to avoid being pushed over. Managed to stay upright but it tore the map from my hand. I could only watch as it skitted violently over the ice and down the mountainside. No question of going after it. Fuck. I’ve got a spare... I think. Green to Amber. 

I inched along for the next few hours with a new routine: find a rock on the horizon: aim for that, forget about everything else. Eventually Corrour came into view in the fading light. I let out a whoop, then saw the gullies I had to cross. My line had taken me much higher than I intended, so here they were deep and full of snow. I could hear the water gushing underneath so shuffled across on my belly, which is a hard thing to do with a drone strapped to your front. Looked up at one point to see a bemused looking deer watching me struggle. I started laughing and then she scampered off, taking the humour of the situation with her. 

I’ve blacked the rest out, but I made it to Corrour. It had taken me 9 hours: barely a kilometre an hour. No one in the bothy and no real possibility of anyone else coming. They can’t be as mad as me. 

The valley cold and empty that night. Down to -6. Got a fire on and prepared the kit for the next day - I needed a lighter pack. I’d been carrying around 30 kilos in total, which meant I was sinking deep into the snow with every step, then struggling like a drunk beetle to get up whenever I fell (which was often). A lighter pack meant using Corrour as a base and trying for Garbh Choire and back the next day. I packed bare minimum in case of emergency (and enough for a night in Garbh refuge worst-case, without comforts). Delighted to discover the spare map had survived the Bob Scott kit-cull. Amber to green. 

Dinner and a dram before bed. I’d brought a mini radio in for company, wondering if I’d get any signal. I tried it out and caught a few indecipherable fragments of the shipping forecast on a long wave station, but then lost it. Scanned the stations again but found only noise: electro-charged ghost echoes bouncing off the granite. It sounded eerie so I recorded it: a bonus psycho-acoustic nugget for the film.

Went for a pee in the moon shadow of the Devil’s Point. No one for miles. Wind howling angrily. Went to bed questioning life choices.

Upstream Expedition Diaries. Extract. Expedition #3. Dec ’18.

We arrived at the summit of Braeriach a little later than planned. Eerie light and around minus 10 degrees. The camera batteries weren’t happy so needed warming. David and I had always planned to part at this point (he had to get to Raasay the next day) so he took his bearing and headed off into the nothingness. A strange sight as I watched him disappear over the ridge. I would later receive a message from him saying he had to point and dagger off a steep ice field with only one axe and wouldn’t make it back to his car until 9pm that night. Watched his head bob over the horizon then felt predictably lonely. Then: focus. 

Because of the time I decided to camp up on the plateau, warm the batteries during the night and film more of the wells in the morning. Plus I didn’t fancy make the steep descent into Garbh in the dark in uncertain conditions. So - camp, warmth, food, bed. Cold night but got some kip. I only realised yesterday that I must have been the highest person asleep in Britain, assuming there were no nutters on Macdui or Nevis. 

Woke to a cloud line only three meters above my head and a misty sunlight scattering across the flat-top of the mountain. It changed every second and never seemed to have a proper horizon. Stunning and weird but difficult filming conditions. The camera hated it: frost, mist, cold. Erratic flying. At one point it appeared stuck in the air, about 50 metres away - unresponsive to any instruction whatsoever. Up, down, left, right - nothing. Just four blinking red and green lights and the whirring of motors in mid-air. What do I do? I walked closer to it and felt the ground rise, then realised I’d ploughed it straight into the side of the mountain. Even standing next to it I couldn’t tell where the sky started and the mountain finished. 

Filmed what I could (with little idea of what I’d got) but had to get moving so advanced onto Braeriach summit to asses from there. But by then the cloud thickened and the wind picked up so I made the painfully difficult decision to forego the day’s filming in the corrie and take the safer, but much longer, route back into the Lairig by walking north and then round, back in via the Pools of Dee, and then sharp right into Garbh Coire. 

I took my bearing and headed off, keeping the cliffs as close to my right as I dared; beautiful snow-wave cornice shapes plunging into the misty void. The ridge narrowed and it became difficult to tell when I was walking on solid mountain, or when I had strayed onto the overhang. The occasional deep rumbling creak of the snowpack was the only warning system - step back, slow down, watch the edge.

I’m not really sure what happened next, and I’ve since tried to work it out from the map but I guess only the mountain knows...

I’d picked up (what I assumed must have been) Chris and Dom’s tracks from the day before (I was lucky it hadn’t snowed in the night). Having discussed their route at length I felt reassured following the tracks in tandem with corroborating bearings. But after an hour or so their tracks diverged from my bearing and I had a decision to make. Visibility was down to ten metres now and I still hadn’t started my decent. I decided to follow my compass, assuming it had no ‘opinion’ and that their plans must have changed. But after twenty minutes of lonely striding I began descending way more rapidly than expected and realised I must have been wrong. 

I re-took my bearing and suddenly North showed as ten degrees off of the direction I’d come. Strange. So I split the difference and headed between the two bearings, doubt creeping in. After some more lonely striding I then picked up the tracks again with some relief. But after walking around a hundred yards I noticed that there were only one set of footprints… and realised, with blood running cold, that tracks these were my own. 

In a matter of seconds I had gone from feeling about 80% certain of my position to within a few hundred metres to now not even knowing which way I was facing, or where on the mountain I was. With no visibility all I could do was take a bearing off the sound of a distant waterfall, knowing full well how sound plays tricks in the fog. I eventually settled on what seemed like a sensible direction, and with held breath, set off into the snow and the mist again, in search of home.

Between the picnic, the comma and the lightning

Correspondence to family after the passing, ‘in impolite succession’ of Chris Potter and Lynn Ritchie, two of the most wonderful people I’ve ever known. After: Picnic Comma Lightening by Laurence Scott. Read it, it’s brilliant. 

- - - - 

Hi all, 

Reviving this thread as I've been thinking a lot about Lynn and Chris the last few days: the sadness seems to come and go in tides. 

I've just arrived early for a flight (very unlike me) and have an unexpected hour to transcribe some words which have been of some comfort. They’re from a book I picked up the other day. It's called 'Picnic Comma Lightning' and from what I've read so far seems like a fascinating dissection of the changing nature of reality. It's by Laurence Scott and I recommend it. 

Some paragraphs in particular resonated, though in line with the book's subject matter, I've been bending the text to fit my own reality, or rather the un-reality of a world without Lynn and Chris. To that end I've been reading and re-reading in jumbled order, diving into some pages and then going backwards, or editing in my head as I go. Sometimes the words blur on the page, or in memory, morphing from the author's original 'mum and dad' to my own 'uncle and aunt'. 

So the below text is a kind of representation of this, a tailored-remix, but given the subject matter of the book I think the author would approve. Either way, these words, in something like this order, had an effect on me. 

I hope they do for you too. 

With love from Dusseldorf Flughafen, Gate B37. 

x. 

- - - - - - - - - -

In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert tells us very early that his mother died when he was three. The cause is given curtly, mid-sentence: '(picnic, lightning)' and, after a paragraph of tender analogies about his dim recollections of her, she is never mentioned again. 

For some time, there was something about Nabokov's sentiment that I didn't understand. It seemed ruthlessly ironic, flippant and wicked. But recently, my own uncle and aunt died in impolite succession. They were both in their seventies and had no business going anywhere. 

The suddenness of their loss ran like radioactive iodine through my sense of reality. It had a way of making things very real, but also, somehow, less so. There are many merciless truths: they will never walk into a room, never send a birthday card. They'll never be waiting at the train station. They don't sleep. They don't light the candles before dinner, or listen to the Archers. 

Their loss has not only highlighted the materials from which my reality is made, but transported me into a new one. The change was as clean as the flicking of a light switch, although whether it has been turned on or off is unclear. It feels like the lights have gone up after a great party, while also being a plunge into the dark. 

And with that flick, these two impossible beings have migrated, from the outside to the inside of life. And though they don't trip our senses anymore by hugging us, or swing into view over the crest of a road as two unmistakable thumbprint silhouettes, they live, at least part-time, in our mind's electro-charged darkness. I mean just look: there they are. They have posthumous opinions on the news; they roll their eyes, they laugh. They ask about the boat. They approve of the new shed. 

They are mythological, time-travelling creatures, who appear in different forms and hail from different decades, brown-haired one minute, grey the next. They mow the lawn, lay the table or stand at a long-gone kitchen-counter, as if nothing bad had ever happened. 

And it’s made me wonder: what is a real person? Because overnight we've been landed with this sudden, astonishing hybrid, made up of memories and intimate knowledge. The past now spreading itself across our everyday reality in a more concerted way than before, with both of them occupying the middle distance. 

So maybe now I understand Nabokov's bracketed tragedy better than I did before. The parenthesis are an attempt to contain the intense brutal reality of loss; to house the unimaginable, to barricade the horror from the rest of life. They make a little fortification in the middle of his narration. '(Picnic, lightning)' is, after all, a cellular story, a two-word drama, with all the detail and energy packed tightly inside it. And for all his wickedness I understand Humbert on this point: where do we put our dearest dead in the story of our lives? What happens when a reality more real than our mundane experience comes forking into our midst? 

With these questions the whole thing grows in my mind into a scene: the edges of a dress rippled from the grass below. The wicker baskets, the parasol. For now, the thunderheads are pretty; standing like bleached cauliflowers as still as statues behind the escarpment. 

And it's at this point that I hit pause, throwing down a comma, which can keep the lightning back, at least for a moment. 

The Unwinnable War

A man in a florescent jacket, with his name - GUY - stitched onto his breast pouch, has just asked me to tidy up the things on my the roof of my boat. He’s part of the private security militia that patrol the newly revamped Paddington Basin area around Merchant Square. I’m guessing the sight of my narrowboat renovation project isn’t quite what the planners promised the buyers when they sold in the prospect of canalside living. I also doubt this man is called Guy, he doesn’t seem like a Guy. 

A few miles East from here, where the developments are some way behind Paddington, glossy hoarding panels display rendered images of gleaming identikit (un)affordable homes, towering above a picturesque, rubbish-free waterways and lovely looking narrowboats with absolutely no stuff on their roofs. But these images ignore an important fact about boating: that in reality, all boats are fighting an unwinnable war with water.

Scientifically speaking water is the strangest substance on the planet: it has half the molecular weight of most gases and yet exists as a liquid, a liquid that actually becomes less dense as it freezes, has a neutral pH and yet dissolves almost anything. All around me, as Guy and I are talking, water is acting by process of electrochemical oxidation to corrode the steel in the hull, causing it to rust, while also providing the perfect environment for fungi to secrete an enzyme that breaks down cellulose in the wood of the cabin, causing it to rot. Water doesn’t want my boat to exist and one day it will have its way. 

But choosing to fight this battle also comes with some reward: the boat offers me a means to poke around in the London’s underbelly, to explore behind the curtain. It has pulled me onto another path, jolted my awareness of the city, changed both my lens and my pattern of movement by rotating my own axis of exploration 90 degrees clockwise; now East to West not North to South, influenced not by the grooves worn by the flow of capital, but of water. I like that.

This boat has also changed my understanding of place. I link memories of time spent afloat to where I was moored rather than to the interior of the cabin itself, and I think about what the light was like, and which way my bow was facing. But the interior of the cabin also has its own character and my resulting ‘sense of place’ is somehow the result of an interrelation between the two, so it’s fuzzy, not fixed. I like that too. 

So these are the reasons I choose to live on the boat, even if that choice is complicated by the mischievous actions of millions of bonded oxygen and hydrogen atoms, atoms of trouble and joy.

So I said all that to Guy but he told me I still had to tidy up the stuff on my roof.

The Perfect Frame

I’m obsessed with this image. 

I shot it, but I didn’t know I’d shot it. Let me explain... It was June 2012… the wettest one on record, ever, and we were right in the middle of filming the Olympic Torch relay. 70 days. 70 films and a metric-pixel-tonne of footage from around the British Isles. But not on this day: whatever day it was, wherever it was, it was raining harder than I’ve ever seen it rain before. I was soaked to the core and, for perhaps the first time on the job, actually feeling a bit fed up. 

So I chose not to shoot anything outside that morning, I thought we’d be able to get enough later that day when it as due to brighten up. Instead I ramped up the frame rate and the shutter speed on the camera, stuck it out of the back window and asked my colleague to speed through the towns en route. I had no idea what I was filming, or whether it would turn out but when it came to the evening edit I found an unexpected delight: a mesmerising, strange, slow-flow-snapshot of an entire belt of Midland towns and among it all… this frame. This... perfect frame.

Fibonacci Perfect...

Impressionist Perfect...

Britpop Perfect...

Breakthrough-Indie-Act-Of-The-Year-Perfect...

I don’t know where it was, I don’t know who they are, but it captures the exact moment before the two blokes on the right processed the fact that they were being filmed. It depicts that nanosecond between them seeing the camera and deciding how to react, what mask to wear. It is, in short, the most truthful moment that could possibly be obtained… before the performance: the light - or terror - in their eyes. It’s what Carl Bohem’s character was searching for in Peeping Tom: that moment of truth that he thought you only glimpsed seconds before someone’s imminent death. Well Carl, it turns out you don't need to strap an enormous spike to your camera and go around murdering people to find it; you just need to stick it out the back window of a Skoda and speed through the streets on a rainy day. 

But it's not ONLY their expressions, it's everything else: the man obscuring his face with an iPad works as a perfect metaphor for how technology has replaced our identity, the dominant St. George's cross relegates the discarded Union Jack in a prophetic nod to the impending referendum on Scottish independence (I mean, the DETAIL). Oh and the rest: the sad, damp wig, the carefully-chosen stances (the umbrella man in Hitchcock profile), the red brick, the rain, the INDIVIDUAL DROPS of rain… I could go on. But I won't, I'll just redesign the English flag instead...

But looking at it again, after nearly four years, my eye is drawn to the iPad and I’m struck with a strange afterthought...

Somewhere, on some hard drive, in some house near some B-road through some redbrick town in the middle of England is a digital photograph of a soggy, grumpy director leaning out of a car window, totally unaware that he is, at that exact moment, filming the most perfect thing that has ever been filmed. And he can take absolutely no credit for it at all. 

The First Thing

Notes from Chad. Part 1 of 3.

As I sit patiently, in a sweltering room on the outskirts of N’djamena, watching a suited official forensically examine my papers, my eyes wander to the small window behind him, or more precisely to the blizzard beyond. Straining my eyes as I try to work out how it could be snowing in a place this hot, I realise the raging storm is actually a swarming mass of midges, mosquitoes and hard-shelled beetles. There are many things I am about to learn about this strange country but the first is this: Chad is a country where the bugs have won. 

It is on the orders of Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser that we are here. Sheikah Mozah, the second wife of the now former Emir of Qatar, chairs the Qatar Foundation, a charitable trust that has taken on the seemingly insurmountable task of getting 20% of the world's out-of-school children back into education. Geraint, our companion and Her Highness' right hand man (an ex-Clinton Administration diplomat who looks like he's stepped straight off the set of The West Wing), has just told me a story about how she once asked him to estimate the number of children in the world not attending school. He posited a figure of figure 60 million, causing her to slide her blank cheque book across the table and tell him that she wanted half of them back in school within 10 years. ‘You should have seen her face, Rob, when I told her that I couldn’t do it… I couldn’t end wars with her cheque book.’ So he convinced her to run a pilot scheme instead and opt for a mere 20% target as opposed to 50. Easy peasy. And so, with another film crew following Her Highness around the war-torn Gaza strip, Rwanda and the Ivory Coast, we are here in Chad appended to a delegation trying to broker a deal with the government to allow this massive influx of funds to UNICEF, the chosen beneficiary and my job is to make a film about the children who will benefit from the work that UNICEF will do. 

But it’s not quite as simple as that. The problem is, it wasn’t until yesterday that Sheikhah Mozah decided that Chad would be a suitable recipient of the aid, so no agreement is in place with the government to allow the funds into the country: that’s up to Geraint to persuade the Minister of Education, who he is to meet with tomorrow. And with the government feeling snubbed by the Qataris (why shouldn’t they be in charge of the funds they might wonder?) it’s quite possible that the Minister will demand such stringent terms that there will be no agreement. The fact that my brief is to make a film about a story that may not happen doesn’t escape the discerning official. ‘I’m hoping for the best’ I tell him. He smiles and continues to look through my paperwork. 

So here I am, sitting silently in a small interrogation room, barely 24 hours after I found out I was coming here, and knowing almost nothing about where ‘here’ is at all. Perhaps that’s of little surprise however: there is little-to-no international presence in Chad… no media, no embassies, barely any multi-national companies and very few foreign aid agencies. A quick scan of the guidebook on the plane told me that this is a country bigger than South Africa but with little more than 300 miles of paved road, no railway and only 14,000 fixed phone lines among a population of 10 million. Couple that with the fact that Chad hosts more than 70 languages and dialects across its five hundred thousand square miles and it's easy to wonder what basis there is for a nation-state at all. Like most of the sub-Saharan African countries, the borders were drawn up by the administrative colonial powers with no consideration for local ethnic or historical realities on the ground. Chad is a former French colony but it seems they weren't interested in building a state. It gave them a rich supply of slaves and cotton but wasn't deemed good for much else. By the 1950s it was for the French, as it is for much of the international community now, of no interest at all. 

So as I sit in the small room, still transfixed by the biblical swarm of insects outside, the official (after much deliberation) gives a small grunt and decisively stamps his approval on my letter from the Minister, hands it back to me with a smile and wishes me good luck, even asking if I would like ‘un petit café’ before I hit the road. How strange. 

But stepping out into the blizzard, a free man, I get the distinct feeling that the strangeness has just begun...