a new eden

That summer I became interested in the playground. Well, I’ve always been interested in the playground — keeping it litter-free, keeping the bammers out, salting it in winter, clearing leaves in autumn but I’ve usually left the vegetation alone. It wasn’t really my job and it looked like hard work. That changed during the lockdown (remember that?).

For us, in the school, the lockdown had phases. For the first few weeks it was just the on-shift janny rattling around on their tod. After a while things got more organized. Teachers appeared and those young adults who, for one reason or another, were deemed unfit to continue their education at home. At other times we’d have part of the school, or all of it back. With proper social distancing policies in place of course. Have you ever tried to socially-distance young adults? It doesn’t work. But fairly soon we’d have an outbreak of covid, or there be a big one somewhere else, or there would be a new variant on the loose. Then it would be back to the skeleton crew.

It was during the quiet times that I did my gardening. There wasn’t a lot else to do. There were only a few young adults, so there wasn’t much mess to clear up, there were no deliveries, we didn’t have anything to set up for, the kitchen was closed, everything had been cleaned twice. After a while what we could do ran out. So I went outside.

I was just filling time really, I didn’t have a plan. I think what changed is that, for once, I managed to do all the weeding. The beds and borders, which had been neglected since the gardening contract that we’d had for the first couple of years after we’d moved in had expired were now very overgrown. These were now full of rampant weeds, nameless shrubs, botanical thugs, and the random survivors of what had been originally planted. The lawn hadn’t been cut and was interestingly wild. The weeding, and me trimming the verges of the beds, had sharpened the edges, I liked this look — unruly nature framed by sharp-straight concrete. I started to get ideas.

Often I did my gardening accompanied by Stephen. Two, or three, times a week Stephen would get to spend a couple of hours with strange old Neil. As a reward or punishment? I don’t know. It wasn’t that unusual for young adults who, “did not play well with others”, to be paired off with me. I didn’t mind this and the young adults didn’t seem to mind my company. It wasn’t anything formal, what we did was left up to me and nobody asked me about it, it was just down-time for the young adult I think. Anyway, one day something happened that reminded me of a long ago incident involving my grampa.

My grandfather, grampa, and I were close. I was his first grandchild and favourite, something that he never cared to hide, he had little time for other people’s feelings. Over the years we spent quite a bit of time together. He looked after me before I went to school.

My pre-school memories, untrustworthy inchoate flashes, as such things are, are of bright sunny days, running about the garden, totally free, wearing a cap. Grampa must have been watching me, although how much attention he gave to me I don’t know. He must have paid some attention — there were numerous ways a tiny child could get themselves badly killed in our garden and I bear no scars. My uncle Bill remembers visiting the house when he was wooing my auntie Cath and finding grampa and I sitting on the front path playing with ancient fat bronze pennies.

—— And who is this?

—— Vikky

—— What’s her real name?

—— Vlicktoria

—— And this one?

—— George

—— Which George?

Needless to say I don’t remember any of this.

When I got older we played golf together. I hated golf and was utterly useless at it but grampa loved golf — he played his last round in his nineties. The only times he didn’t play were during the wars; in the first one because he was fighting, in the second because he wouldn’t play when other men were fighting.

When the Friday nights were light I’d go to my grandparents’ after school for tea. Which was tea and toast and potted heid i.e. the congealed remains that you get from boiling some poor animals head. The toast was iffy too — granny made all the toast for the day when she got up in the morning. By teatime it had lost its freshness. Eventually grampa would go through the performance of taking out his watch. This was the watch, a gold fob, he’d been given (or bought?) when he was working on the railroads in America before the war. He was always fussing with it. It was to have been mine after his death but he dropped it down the lavvy and lost it before he died, so all I got was his Machine Gun Corps cap badge and the bit of shrapnel that they’d pulled out of his leg somewhere near Wipers in ‘17. The watch said that it was time to catch the number 11 bus to Hillend.

We played at Lothianburn, gone now, where we were both members, grampa forever, me not-so-long. It was tucked right up against the Pentlands, a hilly horror of a course, everywhere sloped, exposed to the furies of every element and hoaching with sheep. Why grampa had originally chosen it I don’t know. It wasn’t a course for old people.

We’d play twelve holes and then have a drink in the clubhouse; a whisky for grampa, a stone-ginger and lime for me. I didn’t like ginger and lime but grampa insisted that I did. Grampa was the oldest member so he was treated with nauseous deference by the other members. They were always coming up to fawn on him and ask his opinion on things that he could know nothing about. There had once be an older member than grampa — Doc. But his birth certificate had somehow been found, showing him to be much younger than he claimed. It was a big scandal, he never dared showed his face in the club again. I always suspected that grampa had some hand in the discovery of that birth certificate.

It was on one such Friday evening that the incident that I’m referring to occurred. We were on the 15^th tee. The 15^th ran along the ditch that separated the course from the ski slope. This ditch was clogged with the scrubby type of bushes that make their lives in ditches and became a burn when it rained enough. It might even have been the Lothianburn; I don’t remember there being any other watercourses around. There were three youths on the ski slope side of this ditch, clearly waiting to steal golf balls from the 14^th green. They weren’t being subtle about it. Grampa went towards them, shaking his two wood and giving them a piece of his mind. I was petrified — we were going to be beaten up for sure. But they just flashed the vickies at us and ran off laughing. Grampa walked back to me and teed up, completely unruffled.

Something similar happened when I was in the playground with Stephen. There were a couple of loutish teenagers, not ours, messing about on one of the raised beds. Stephen and I were picking litter on the lawn. I shouted at them, possibly I waved my arms. It was the lockdown they weren’t supposed to be together, and they weren’t supposed to be here at all. I was reminded of the occasion with grampa. Steven didn’t react like I did that time…

——Aren’t you scared? He asked, his face smiling up at me; for once un-hoodied.

——Well don’t you do that. Remember that I’m old, and I’ll look sort-of important to them. And they probably don’t really want any trouble. Pretty lame, grampa would have managed something better. I had a sudden thought, how does Stephen see me?

That’s unusual — for me to wonder how I come across to others. Normally I think of myself as fairly invisible. That people have been talking about me when I amn’t there surprises me; or when they say something about my character that suggests they’ve been watching me. It’s not something that I can easily think about either, and when I do force myself to think about it my mind tends to drift. So, to wonder what Stephen made of me was unusual.

If this had been all that happened, I wouldn’t have dragged you through this excursus. But, as we were walking back inside, I spotted a couple of students watching us from the accommodation block that’s right next to the school. I wondered how they saw us. After all they’d been banged up in there for ages. Perhaps, starved of stimuli, we were the only entertainment they had? And what did they think about the playground? It’s not as if I could explain it to them.

That thought must have stayed with me. Because that summer, as I was messing about in my garden I realized that I had an opportunity to do just that — use these nature journals to explain what I was doing. To try to convince the staff to see the playground through my eyes.

I’ve gathered together the first few bits I wrote about the playground here so that you can get an idea what it looks like and what I was trying to do.

a plan

Drought has given me a chance to try something. You didn’t know that there is a drought? Well there isn’t really, it’s just in some of our planters. The natural water-table is level with the base of the school [I know this because it regularly caused flooding in the plant-room before it was finally sealed], so these planters are totally reliant on rainfall. Of which there hasn’t been much lately. Death has given us a tabula rasa. So what’s the plan?

Wildflowers that come in a plastic packet. I think poppies. We’re a bit late in the season for these but it’s worth a try. I reckon, (pulling a figure from that part of my body upon which I sit on when using a chair) that we have a 50% chance of success. And they should self-seed in future years. I’ve grubbed up what life was there, ground elder and thistles mainly, and will rake and sow next week. A quick drenching should then get things started.

speaking of wildflowers

It’s going to be close. There are buds a-plenty on the sundeck. Will they burst forth by next week? And what will they look like if they do? Garish nightmare of clashing colours? Or the tasteful plot of my dreams? Time will tell.

a change of plan

What follows below will (hopefully) explain why I used the photograph above.

I was slumped in the office when Lucy came in and offered me some bee-bombs for our planters. I jumped at the chance, well, I sat up a bit. I read the blurb that came with the bombs. They seemed perfect and as I already had a couple of the beds cleared it was the work of a five moments to plant the things. That should have been it, but I got to thinking…

I took my phone for a wander—the results of which you can see below. So what you ask? That’s a lot of boring photos.

Since we moved into the school I’ve been thinking about the playground; you do when nearly every day you wander around it picking up litter. What kind of look do we want for it? And having decided that how do we achieve it?

I wasn’t privy to the architect’s plans for the grounds. Indeed, I’m not sure that they really had any beyond a bland public-space mix of shrubs and trees. Maybe I do them a dis-service, the Wisteria is nice. I just feel that we need different.

The young adults seem to want biodiversity and I am with them on this but it’s a tricky thing to create. Then you have to maintain it. And finally you have to sell the aesthetic to people. To me our nettle-lands look lovely, others may just see rampant weeds. I already have trouble selling the slightly unfinished look of the school as deliberate and attractive to some people. We need a plan and a hymn-sheet.

I was going to write a manifesto but I’ve settled for a keyword: re-wilding. That’s very popular nowadays. Although it might not be strictly appropriate — Fountainbridge has been home to slums and dark Satanic mills for the last couple of hundred years at least. Wild hasn’t had a look-in around here for a while.

Hopefully that explains the photograph at the top, we want at least one of something like that. The other photographs are the areas that we want to re-wild™. I wonder if any of this will happen?

allotment on the water

I was enjoying one of my regular peregrinations when I chanced upon a host of verdant cabbages. Growing on a barge. There was also a barge with something called a flower puppet that was apparently going to sing. I decided to miss that bit but I scored some chives from a tent that was dispensing free herbs.

Apart from the musical marionette-horror the whole Dandelion project strikes me as worthy. The Dandelion project seems to have ended; my original links are now dead. And the fact the the barge even made it here shows how far the canal has come. When I first started walking the canal it was still closed at Wester Hailes. The water was carpeted with duckweed, the towpath splattered with pigeon-crap and, apart from the pigeons, the fauna seemed to consist of Coots and a few Moorhens. The Coots and the duck weed are long gone, I suppose the Coots ate the duckweed. The Moorhens are still here.

more changes

This next big change will be the building of new flats in the hole in the ground. How this will change things I don’t know. As you can see above the local anarchists believe that the new flats are misjudged.

My thoughts? I’m not hopeful:

• The developer’s website is crap IMHO. Look at all that tiny grey text, nobody is going to read that. A bad sign, are these not designers?
• People who use the phrase “high quality public realm provision” are not to be trusted. Apart from anything else it’s ambiguous — are they going to provide a high-quality public with a kingdom?
• It all looks to lack soul, a Hanging Gardens of Babylon pastiche where the plants will die.
• Despite the airy talk of retail opportunities and pop-up events this looks like a place for a rapid walk-through rather than a place to enjoy for itself.
• That giant clock to the right of the above picture? That won’t happen.
• How will it cope being overrun with rats, pigeons and seagulls and covered in litter?

I imagine that whatever happens it won’t disturb the Moorhens.

solar

More drought related gardening nonsense I’m afraid.

There are some areas of any building and its surrounds that may become, shall we say, problematic. The path down the East of the school would make a fine examplar of one such area. This is a fire escape route, which has to be kept clear, a task in itself even without the filth that floats in from the street. Wet litter enmeshed in overgrown jaggy-plants is not a fun thing to clean up. Notice that nice clump of nettles? I’ve had issues with that. The greenery must go.

Every year we’ve said and done that. And every year it has grown back with a renewed vigour. A lovely thing to tackle on a wet winter’s morning. I have lost patience, nature must be suppressed.

You can’t really control nature — it will have its way. At best you can try to trick it into doing something more like what you want. But you do need to take the conditions into account. That would be dank and gloomy. Maybe ferns, moss and bamboo? In my head that sounds good. Japanese chic.

Fortunately there were a lot of bits of stone left over from the various works going on around here. So the hard-landscaping is mostly down. Now we just need the plants. The moss will come by itself if conditions suit (although I will help it a bit). I’ll think about planting in the spring after I’ve grubbed-up the weeds that will thrive over winter.

While I’ve been working down there I’ve noticed something interesting—the Sun shines directly down the length of the passage at noon. In fact you only get a couple of hours of direct Sun. I’m going to pretend that the school was intentionally orientated so that this was so for some (doubtless) nefarious reason. We’ll call it the Solar garden and say that a Kami lives there. Another nice Japanese touch.

plots

The time has come to talk of horticulture. The visit of Shirley Anne, who came to make sure that we’ve been looking after the place (she opened it remember), has concentrated some of the school minds on all things re: re-cycling; re-wilding; re-birth; re-volution. Well, we may have wandered off-topic there, you know what I mean. My mind has become concentrated on what we should do with the playground.

I don’t know what you think about the playground, maybe you don’t think anything much? I spend quite a lot of time in it, so I do. When we moved in the only contexts in which I thought about it were cleaning and security. I’d never had a playground that couldn’t be locked before. Here, even if we could lock it, it would be as porous as a standard school roof. Dave, the policeperson we had then, and I discussed it, we agreed that trying to keep people out wasn’t a viable option. So we allowed them in with the proviso that they were tidy and behaved themselves.

This was tricky, short of a strongly worded poster campaign, that people would ignore, how to inform the hoi polloi of our policy? Surprisingly you can get a lot across by just subtle nudges — you probably know where I want the re-cycle bins put, did I tell you that? Cleaning is our big lever, this place has to look very-very clean. Here that’s achievable, the old place was, frankly, a midden.

We (the jannys) try to be visible, friendly and approachable in the playground. (So I’m being visible when you think I’m having a fag). This should, hopefully, give people the feeling that the place is looked after and watched. Does it work? After the weekends we don’t find much mess, almost no broken glass, and the bins are full of Dragon soop cans, pizza boxes, vodka bottles, and other debauchery paraphernalia. If the reprobate classes are using the bins correctly I think we’re doing something right. So now, as I said, it is time to talk of horticulture.

A series of accidents have given us a chance for a fresh start: there was a dry summer the year we moved in, a lot of stuff we’d been given didn’t establish; the lockdown happened and nothing got looked after, so we got to see what might be possible by not looking after things; the under-soil water system broke on the sundeck; this year we had a fairly serious drought. Plants died, making space for new plants.

It’s not a totally fresh start — we had some elements of the future already in place. For the long term we have the trees. The Keep Scotland Beautiful people, who came with Shirley Anne, gave us a Pear Tree, which will go in one of the raised beds currently in the workies’ compound. This bed, despite consisting of one single tree, will be described as The orchard. If we’re short of a tree I would say that a Chilean Pine would make the statement the we are here to stay and will keep the Devil away (or perhaps give him a home).

While I won’t live to see the trees at their best I do hope to live long enough to see the climbers achieve something like their final spread. We have a nice mix of climbers, most of whom have grown to the top of their range. They should sense that there’s now no more up and start growing along their fences. The Wisteria is, of course, lovely but the vines in the solar are coming on. They’re turning a lovely red just now, giving us a taste of their future glory at this time of year.

As to the rest of the playground the plan is still the same: to see what nature brings us and help where we can. This means moss for the solar, and wildflower seeds for the beds outside of the teaching kitchens.

One plan has changed — the home of my spirit. When we left the old place I promised never to visit it again as a living man. I’ve now decided that for eternity here is a better fit. So if you are lucky enough to see the mature playground and the full majesty of the trees, think of me, remember reading this, then, in some sense, I’ll be here with you again.

moss

On Saturday I decided, as the weather was nice, to gather moss for the Solar. From the photographs above you should see what this involves. I’m developing an obsession about the solar. There have been signs. That I’ve started to make up unnecessary rules for myself, that I’ve been gathering coloured rocks, that I dug up ferns from St. Bride’s when I was working there over the summer to replant. I’ve forced George and Daz to transport a very large rock from the building site across the road. All good evidence of an emerging obsession.

Not that there’s anything wrong with having an obsession, it’s a rather dull janny who doesn’t have at least a couple. It’s a professional tic: doctors have poor handwriting, primary 1 teachers can’t spell, politicians are liars, jannies are barking. I remember an egregious example from my youth.

North Merchiston has now been burnt to the ground, replaced by a health centre. Which is a shame, it was a nice old building with a cold edgy gothic vibe. It was home to the audio-visual unit, some Napier students and a collection of old personnel records. Although the janny didn’t have a glass eye, it will help with the picture if you imagine that he did. At first sight I didn’t warm to him, he was short and wore a grandiloquent wig, he looked as if he’d been thatched. He clutched a clipboard and a rather sinister collection of sticks hung from a chain at his waist.

It was a Friday afternoon and I was to take over for the next week, I was led through the routine. We started in a classroom on the top floor, it was set up with exam desks. A page on the clipboard and a stick from the bunch were ponderously selected. The stick measured the space between each column of desks and the clipboard detailed the number of floorboards between rows. The sight of him hopping around like a giant Grasshopper, swooping to ensure that all was millimetre perfect still sends a thrill of horror through me. I think that it was the ghastly verve with which he did it that was the most unsettling thing. That or the muttering. We repeated this process in another ten classrooms, each had its page, each had its stick. My increasingly pitiful attempts to convince him that I’d grasped the essential idea and could we stop now please, fell on deaf ears. If there were ears under the thatching.

Your school holds few secrets about you from another janny, over the next week I came across many examples of a mind unhinged. He was totally gaga. Apparently he’d been fairly normal once, but being alone all day in a big building without much to do had loosened the very moorings of his mind. Thing was, he seemed very happy.

That’s enough gardening for now methinks. There will be more to follow, but for now it’s time to mourn a Queen.