In My Mind's Eye

I think about the space where I'm going to build Proposition Cottage and linger there holding my minds eye focus in the corner of the garden. I consider the topography and the groundwork that will be needed, I contemplate the terrain.  There is a large Holly tree and a scruffy Damson, there are two compost bins, the contents well rotted.  They are the site of many much needed pisses during late night poker sessions in the summer house.  There is the neatly layered pile of thorny long term compost with its five year gestation period. There are the remnants of the trunk of a giant tree stump.  I struck this from the ground and heaved it there last Christmas with my son, some jobs can only be completed with muscle and sweat.  I optimistically rub its bark with oyster mushrooms hoping to infuse it with spores. 

There is the Arborglyph I carved into the sycamore tree :- 

I incised the text in the week we moved into our new home, the white pith upset me and I quickly "aged it down" by rubbing soil into the wound. The bark is growing back now so it stands out less. It no longer slaps you in the face like the raw scar from a thick lip. I am not sure about this act of inscription, there is a level of romance but also a concern that I have inflicted something unnatural. Perhaps I should have drawn a heart pierced by cupids' arrow rather than the number 4.  I am interested in the way ugly inscriptions can be justified by the importance of what they say. My tree desecration, even as a mark of change and manifestation of life long love, may not cut the mustard. Standing in the space of Proposition Cottage is not like standing on a building site; there is nothing there yet, only words and half cocked ideas. 

I'm concerned it may be a bit dark and in the shade, perhaps it will be little different to the cellar where my tools now live.

And I Jump:

My mum took me to York Theatre Royal to see an adaption of Harold Pinter's 'The Caretaker'. I was probably too young to really understand the desperation but I remember the caretaker Aston's pile of wood and his desire to build a shed.  The fact that the shed would never get built didn't matter to me.  At least he had an idea, an aspiration, a desire.

And I jump:

My Grandad Billy had an area in his front garden that he called his 'Tippy Bit'. If we desired a short piece of wood to chock something up, a piece of rusty metal to use as a wedge or the bone handle of an old carving knife, they could all be uncovered in the tippy bit.  A place for things that may or may not come in useful is a place of propositions, it proposes potentials that are not yet known.

And I Jump :

The top of the wall was cast concrete and we would sharpen our penknives on it. We used spit to lubricate and form a slick pumice-like paste.  The knife was sharp when you could shave the bum fluff hairs on your arms - we would wear our bald arm patches with pride.  This jump only has the potential to be relevant.

The space at the bottom of the garden is my plotland. I can build what I want as long as it does not exceed 2.3 meters in height or block a neighbour's line of sight.   Over the wall just behind is the Victorian cemetery slightly overgrown with knotweed and old silver birch trees. It is a wild place that has forgotten it is a place for bodies and mourning. Most of the tombstones mark the resting places of people lost from living memory, few of the inscriptions mean anything to anyone.  

In the last days of summer I pace the garden and want to feel the space as a proposition, the space however will only meet me halfway. Like Aston the Caretaker's pile of wood and Billies 'Tippy Bit' the proposition and the mind conjure desire, hope and aspiration. But not material things.

There is a moment before the start of any new project where the outcome is unknown. Where every potential remains possible.  I will hold this space a little longer before taking up the axe and the mattock and setting my body against the earth.