Funny weather today, grey in the morning, sunny in the afternoon, raining now. As I sit here, at eight in the evening, I’m not entirely sure where the last twelve hours have gone. I’ve written a couple of 1970 Music posts, read my book a bit, and popped along to the shops for some geraniums that’ll be potted on to brighten up the shed. I did a bit of editing/revision. I made some bread. Other than that, not a lot.
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Forty-five years ago, the BBC broadcast a programme, in the The World About Us series, what was then thought of as controversial but now as prescient; Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside. It was made just as foxes were urbanising, a process now such a commonplace that we don’t remark on it. Mabey also comments on urban kestrels, probably not anticipating that we would now be seeing urban peregrin falcons.
The programme often disappears from YouTube when the lawyers find it, a fate that befell it some time after I last posted a link in 2014. If you have a spare fifty minutes, and it is available where you are, I recommend a watch.
As I commented in 2014:
It is interesting for other reasons too. One is the splendour of Mabey’s flared trousers and the collars of his shirts, reminding me with embarrassment of dressing for school discos; the other is a particular quality of the film itself. It may be to do with degradation over time, but there is something about the unsaturated tonal palette which is diagnostic of the nineteen seventies, reinforcing the memory of the early part of the decade as uniformly brown, like scuffed corduroy jeans.
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Music: A friend said that Band On The Run last night was the first music he’d actually known here for the last two months. So, just for you Keith, one you’re sure to recognise:
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