The Dream Academy

Big shout to our good radio friend across the pond Justin Patrick Moore on his first book published by South London’s Velocity Press just a couple of miles away from Weeds HQ in Rye Lane, Peckham. 

The book is called The Radio Phonics Laboratory and as it says on Velocity Press’ website “explores the intersection of technology and creativity that shaped the sonic landscape of the 20th Century”. If you love Karlheinz Stockhausen, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Robert Moog and the like, go and buy one from the Velocity website here.

By request of the author here’s a daft dream we had around the time said book went to print. We’ve no idea what relevance the dream has in the scheme of the universe and also what Freud would have said but we can only put it down to a couple of tabs of co-codamol before bedtime to stop toothache.

The dream was about a man who fixed vintage valve radio sets in an old factory in Coventry that also housed an exhibition about radio propagation, “Which is a very interesting subject” the man told us.

The factory was in a street off a back entry behind Cedars Avenue in Coventry where Delia Derbyshire was brought up. In the dream we imagined we woke up and were going to travel back to Coventry to find this non existent factory and the radio exhibition housed within it. Then we woke up!

It’s not much of an exciting “we won the lottery and now live on a luxury Richard Branson type island” dream and doesn’t make much sense, unlike the great book from Justin Patrick Moore. We promise we will never divulge our dreams again but the long and short of it is, if you love a bit of electronica, you’ll love this book!

Fail we may, garden we must

That’s the mad thing with gardening, you’ve been waiting all winter for everything to start and before you know it, it’s nearly June and horticultural madness has ensued and you’ve a “to do” list as long as a garden hoe. There’s no magic day where everything just changes, it just happens and without you even seemingly noticing!

We’ve had some lovely days over the last couple of weeks with glorious sunshine and then overnight on Saturday came some heavyweight rain. Talk about the garden now being in a state of fecundity.

Oddly though we have a strawberry plant in a pot up near the house and been wondering why it hasn’t been doing anywhere as good as the others dotted around the garden especially with the current weather. We assume this could be the reason why (pic above).