night 18
Night 18. Monday 5th December. 2022
Full moon. Well almost. Visibility: very good. Crowdfunder is at £78,412 as I write this at 20.00 on Monday 5th December evening. It is hard to believe we’ve been up here 18 nights. Apparently this is an artic maritime airmass. I think of the container ship crews I met in lockdown, boarding ships bound for Finland, Shanghai and New York. Of what the shipping forecast means to them and of how we never used to check the weather so much. I type in red fingerless gloves that are now fraying all over the keyboard from my DIY cuts. As I turned on the standard lamp and laid out the bedding wondering if I had put on my second layer and realising it might be time for a third, I hear a ‘hello’ from the street below. It’s Sue. She’s sending supportive wishes and comes bearing gifts of chocolate with love. She says maybe we could have a square a night. Rationing it until we reach our target. Chocolate is a great love. I ‘d like to eat it in one go. Sirens and horns blare. The lights of docklands are strung like Christmas garlands over the horizon line. I take inadequate photos without the long lens up here - the moon remains small and blurred with a halo of neon. I’ve yet to watch the Bowie documentary ‘Moonage Daydream’ - floating in a tin can above this blue earth. It can feel like floating or sailing perched up here, seeing the city through distorted transparency, hearing roads like oceans. In my teenage home on the North Wales coast a dual carriageway bore its way through granite mountains separating town from shoreline and making the sound of waves and cars merge into indistinct swells of white noise. Red and white lights mark port and starboard of this city and I don’t know the difference in this panoramic position. A voice below says ‘Merry Christmas’ as if they’re asking a question and car doors close.
Today we ventured up the high street bound for the post office with a wheelbarrow full of parcels – framed sets of greenbacks and book and poster stock for the Fitzwilliam Museum where our exploded van Big Bang 2 is on display. I bought this trusty chariot over ten years ago. It was the cheapest in the shop and was painted red and white with the St George cross flag. I didn’t feel a patriotic wheelbarrow was necessary so painted it fully red which it remained until it went through various alchemical transformations – turning gold to lug bricks and zinc in a project questioning value and silver with wings for E’s first performance with Walthamstow Youth Circus. While we were out we had a takeaway cup of tea. There is something special about holding a hot paper cup in cold hands. Tinged with guilt at not having brought your own reusable one. After the first months of deepest lockdown we were filming the final scenes of Bank Job in a room at the back of the Mill community centre whilst the children lay under tables building their own virtual worlds a block at a time. It felt a significant step to even get a takeaway at that point of semi emergence and when Dan returned with a hot spinach slice and a cup of tea it was a bliss I still feel. The high street is bleak. Something about the shops feels utterly depressing. The lack of stock. The closed Oxfam with random Christmas window. It’s not a market day. Winter is really here now.
Walking back down our street I hear Chi practising saxophone. We’ve invited him to play on the roof. He loves jazz. A dance of digressions – like Agne’s Varda’s jiving lens cap making it into her final edit - like the series of asides this contains. The music continues as we have a team meeting about the song we are recording tomorrow - zoom enthusiasm and interruptions as sound recordist, choir leader and producer work out how best to record 210 children from 4-12 singing a song they don’t know that well. We lean into the beautiful chaos.
Dan’s down. His email out tonight which included something about sleep deprivation did not have the effect he wanted. He’s so tired. And we can’t be tired. We have two days of filming now. A live stream from the rooftop to test, guests to greet and film, a campaign to run. In the time it takes for me to say ‘let’s take a selfie’ (not a phrase I usually utter) to posting it on facebook he is asleep and snoring loudly. On the one hand I hope he sleeps well and is warm enough, on the other – please stop snoring. I’ll make the journey back down the ladder to check on everything and turn off the light and cover it in plastic. Richard sends a picture of their home just across the rooftops - feet up, log burner and football on. Others send hugs and good luck. They are really loud snores. The whole street must be able to hear or think it’s a guttural fox cry. A helicopter flies overhead and drowns it out momentarily.
As I attempt sleep the crowdfunder is at £79,548. I can see into the studios up the road – a shack of a building in an old dairy yard sheltering knife making, ceramics and mushroom growing. I think of mycorrhizal networks and how ours grows with every pledge. I imagine thermal imagining cameras scanning the area and noting unexpected hot spots – warm bodies on rooftops, sleeping animals in bushes, hidden plant life generating visible heat and pigeons congregating where it is leaked. Giving the game away. 2.27am. I thought I’d manage to sleep through but there’s a mysterious sobbing on the street. It sounds like something from a horror movie and vanishes as quickly as it arrived. Constant barking wakes me half an hour later. Tink won’t let up and I worry. The moon is ultra bright and sky clear. I head down the ladder to calm the restless hound.
Today is the most beautiful dawn so far. Glowing peachy pink through the tree that doesn't know what season it is. How do you describe colour adequately? Right now the suburban landscape looks like an example of the skilled scenographic art of a Disney studio. I look East and attempt to zoom in to the horizon line. I travel to the Dartford crossing to watch it rise on the flowing river, out to the estuarine islands where the North Sea glistens. Thames. Dogger. German Bight. The neatly divided territories of the shipping forecast tell another story of the North Sea. Of oil and money. The delightful sounding Rosebank - a name befitting a thatched cottage English idyll, is the location of the largest planned oil and gas field in the North Sea. As Stop Cambo state ‘the climate pollution from this one UK field would be more than the 700 million people in the world’s poorest countries create in a year. These are the same countries that have contributed the least to the climate crisis but which are already experiencing among the worst impacts of a warming planet.’ There are alternatives and this is the route the government take. Rosebank is situated in the shipping chart area of ‘fair isle’. The owners state they ‘are committed to a fair and just transition.’ Words turned inside out and made meaningless. This fair isle is anything but fair. Oil and gas lobbying for the end of humanity.
Yesterday a surprise email arrived. Mark sent us a mix he’s made called ‘Ambient recovery 131 - A night on the roof’ – it begins with sounds of rain and includes samples of our voices. He calls it ‘an attempt to try and capture the juxtaposition of the middle of the night suburban London quiet (that's actually a 360 degree amplifier for a whole range of sounds) with the cosmic wonder of staring up at the night sky.’ I listen to it in the glow of sunrise on the roof and it envelopes me. I want to enter the dreamy sleep of ambient recovery but it’s the wrong end of the day. It remixes with the sounds of parakeets panic flying, building works beginning, children leaving for school, bicycle bells ringing. I read somewhere that Bear Grylls has renamed his alarm clock an ‘opportunity clock’. Googling it to double check that I didn’t dream it I see a reference to this as the ‘tyranny of morning people.’ The tyranny of productivity. And up I get to work. Hi Ho. My chilled hands on cool ladder rungs.
