NIGHT 7
Night 7. Thursday 24 November 2022.
I managed to film a distant fox surveying the railway tracks but the magpies teased me with their raspy chatter and stayed just out of reach and camera view. It’s a wet and windy evening and we’re not through the tasks of the day -including an online parents evening. The need for sleep is strong. Our friend George visited to pick up his framed set of greenbacks and came bearing the gift of a delicious lemon cake. Natalie popped in with a video edit of our rooftop campaign to transfer. We field increasing press enquiries. I wonder if Christo was right quoting Leonard Cohen in the feedback he wrote on my practice for the ‘civic futures’ fellowship: ‘Watching for the card that is so high and wild they’ll never need to deal another.’ We’re certainly up high and wild on the rooftop yet at the same time so domestic and tame and it’s not a contradiction. Or it is. We all are.
It is pouring with rain and I am not looking forward to the night. It’s not an evening for waving but drowning. According to the Met Office the rain will ease in time for a late bedtime 9-10pm so that might have to be it tonight. Tomorrow looks sunny so, although there are zoom meetings and interviews, we need to make the most of it to catch up on filming and photography… and sunshine slumber? I put a call out for any local friends to take pictures if they spot the bed from the train or their loft windows. Today was the first day I haven’t changed out of thermals for the day and that’s probably a mistake. The damp is palpable. It pervades everything – from the houses struggling with rising damp and chronic illness to the past of these streets – built on marshland flood plains of the River Lea winding its way from source at Leagrave near Luton down to the Thames. This nomadic river is now contained by cuts and canals and flanked by water works yet its meandering force is tangible. Concrete lined flood relief channels run fast behind high fences and warning signs. The practice sirens from the reservoirs a reminder that we live by and with water - life giver and taker.
Jo, a 74 year old feisty, fragile former ballerina mentions that where our street now stands there were once watercress fields. I look it up and get lost in a history of the Lea’s Valley’s history of market and nursery gardening. My grandfather worked in this industry– cultivating tomatoes and carnations in humid greenhouses. I keep a picture of this green fingered man - itself faded to green. Chlorophyll heritage. I think of my Grandparents – growing up in an Essex village, leaving school at 13 and straight into service, coming to the big city to work for the upper middle classes lugging coal as chambermaids and earth as gardeners. My grandmother left a brief written recollection of her time in service. A glimpse of a soul full of mischief and poetry. I see this lineage of labour in hardy hands and relentless work ethic. I ‘m quicker to shake off the embedded servitude - the deference to established ideas and establishment.
The rooftop is strewn with clumps of moss and lichen splashes. Natural air pollution indicators and absorbers. Delving deeper I see that the lichen on the rooftop has high nitrogen tolerance. Every time we film I long to remove the cars from the street to get a better shot. It’s easy to forgot that these cars are a relatively new arrival - that our elders remember street playing and horse drawn delivery carts and that there is value in this lived knowledge and collective memory –avoiding the anodyne and often racist undertones of the ‘good old days’ to remember that big societal transformations can happen fast and need to now.
We’re at £26,224. 52%. Dan has sent out an email and we’re updating socials. Although there is constant movement upwards it’s not as fast as before and I feel a sudden sense of desperation at the thought of being on the roof for night after night. If I could forget all responsibilities it might be more of a breeze but this double life is doing me in.
In a period of leaving the bed in the early evening squalls a small disaster has hit. One lamp is broken and the shade is stuck in next doors gutter. The bed has somehow been pulled off its wooden blocks and is at an odd angle. It’s all still tied on and I go around resetting, wiping, clambering under the scaffolding to retrieve the shade in its plastic bag and bringing the lamps down for essential maintenance – all the time aware that people are starting to look out for us and we’re not there. G is asking for pasta and as it cooks I check online. A headache is brewing but I ‘m cheered by Angela, our neighbour opposite, posting Lennon’s ‘Power to the People’ for us. Thank you! This headache may be reaching migraine status and now the Observer journalist has mailed to say they’re considering making it a cover story but not until 18 Dec – we can’t stay on the roof until then! I pull my hat down and my sleeping bag up and forget it all.
Good morning world! I think that was the best night so far. And this is the best morning. All the classics – warm sun rising, birds singing. I realise I haven’t yet seen the electric milk cart from up here but on a day like today the milkman would be whistling too. There is just minimal damp on bed and head. And – the crowdfunder is at £28,554. 57% of the way there. There is a rumble and two chinook military helicopters fly low above. I haven’t seen them since lockdown times. I go in to get G juice and cereals but climb back up quickly to write in the winter sun. I disappointed E this morning as it was the first time I hadn’t raced down to have time with her. I could not lift my head off the slightly moist pillow.
Two sparrows visit the gutters. Last winter I held one of their tiny bodies in my hand and couldn’t revive it, watching its eyes turn to glass. In this sad reminiscence I ‘ve again missed the perfect shot – this time twelve geese flying in formation overhead - at least now I know this is the time for the geese and I will be ready. Signs for bird flu are being tacked up around the park. The morbid vision of dead gannets littering the Hebridean beaches in summer still haunts me. People report sightings of dead swans at Hollow Ponds. A smell of gas drifts up from next door’s heating. This year we all obediently moved vehicles and opened doors to the Cadent engineering team with their job of ‘replacing Victorian gas pipelines.’ This was major works, digging up roads to repair what is soon to be defunct infrastructure. District heat networks now.
