6/1/11
Happy New Year
We have been included on a brilliant new compilation by the Cold Spring record company entitled: 'We Bring You A King With A Head Of Gold' , it is (and I quote) The follow-up to [the] award winning Folk compilation "John Barleycorn Reborn" from 2007. 34 tracks and 146 minutes of music from the best of current British Folk artists.- so there.
We have the honour of being first on side one with 'Earthen Key' from Hedgerows. Thanks to Justin Mitchell the visionary behind the lable, a very eclectic lable well worth supporting.
Check it out here

8/4/10
Fell asleep on bank of primroses today-I’m hopelessly a Romantic and must stop reading Wordsworth, Coleridge etc...lady bird landed on the lyric sheet of new song Picaia, which is the tiny amazing worm-like creature we all evolved from whose fossil was found in the Cambrian shale on the side of a remote mountain in Canada. 

Working hard at new songs for a short round of gigs coming up in a couple of weeks culminating in one at Twick Folk London.  Hate staying in when the weather is so beautiful.  Dozing on primrose bank-best way to observe the secret world of insects.  Spotted three kinds of bee-one very small with a proboscis longer than its body drinking at the primrose lakes.  A huge shining black bee like an indestructible machine barged in on a violet.  I’m recording bees-they all buzz in different keys and it may sound obsessive but I want to know what these keys are.  I admit I have garnered this idea from Gilbert White’s book -the Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne  published in 1760 something.  A friend of his learnt the keys  of different birds by using a pitchpipe-I shall use my pitchpipe to learn the keys of bees.

I have come across a beautiful book-the Observer book of butterflies published in the 1940’s.

Yesterday on the primrose bank the most huge green-yellow butterfly landed on a nearby celandine.  I found it in this book.  I had put this butterfly-the brimstone butterfly into a recent lyric because I discovered it is a diminishing species and it fitted well into a song I am writing.  I am so glad I now know how it looks-here’s picture of it from the Observer book.

4/4/10
I Did zazen for an hour this morning. Felt restless but managed to stay on the cushion.  Eventually through persistence – peace. Birdsong drifting by the open window.  Bristol howling a few miles away. Writing – very difficult.  I am preparing new songs for my own album – although of course Si will be featuring as guitar accompanist, I am accompanying myself on piano.  Ken Nicol generously has agreed to play with  us on one of our songs but I can’t decide which one. I hope I don’t ruin another opportunity through my indecision and dithering.  Meditation is great. It really allows the mud to settle, so in the end, I do not have to decide what to do, I have to do what is in front of me to be done. Meditation puts stuff in front of me where I cannot ignore it. As I finished battling with the songs this morning in the studio, a ladybird, but an unusual one scarlet and black like a snake’s back, appeared and settled on my finger. I had a job after close inspection to dislodge it. As some of these new songs are inspired by my life at Dartington and by the natural world and all the first drafts were, in fact, written on the banks of the Dart a few months before we left, I take this as an extremely good auger of the future.     

17/3/10

I came upon field after field of newly pleached hedging on land in Barrow Gurney, mostly Blackthorns and May tree also Ash and Oak. Two Great Tits already appeared from a fresh nook claiming their patch perhaps in a highly prized new catching ground. I was moved by the sight of such oblique mastery of the Hedgerows in time for spring nesting.

What made my Christmas, which seems such a short while ago, was the arrival through my letter box on Christmas Eve of this:

And a little note thanking Si and me for our contribution- a page of our lyrics to the song ‘England Needs Her Hedgerows’.

An excellent magazine with articles such as this:

...on Hedge laying and full of good contacts to encourage the new hedge layer-