Not all gold at harvest time

• Tags:
• Cash
• harvest
• Lightfoot
• McKuen

Posted by Cliff Birchall on August 28, 2008 11:23 AM

Work has just begun on this summer's cereal harvest. The number of fields being cut is increasing daily and soon I expect the road will be alive [albeit slowly] with tractors and trailors taking straw and grain from field to barn.
But while farmers are able to get on the land hereabouts, it is not the same everywhere.
Last night I was listening to the markets programme on RTE radio and it painted a completely different picture of the harvest in Ireland.
Rain has brought a real dampener to the countryside there.
Continual rain has meant that many farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to take heavy machinery on to the land, with serious consequences.
Farmer Sam Houlihan was interviewed and spoke about life on his farm at present, where rain means he cannot start cutting his corn. If he took his machinery on, it would simply bog down.
This meant that his workers were having to stand idle, or do unnecessary jobs. "We're sweeping the same yard twice," was his wry comment.
The ground was drying out a little but the topmost layer was still damp. Walk on to it and your boots were soon caked in mud. Imagine taking a combine or baler on to that.
Some farmers were managing to get on, but at a price, said Sam. Those farmers with straw choppers were able to work, running their combines over chopped straw. But this would present a premium in the future. The price of straw would rise in the winter as supplies shortened as so little was being brought into the farmyard because it was being used for this unusual purpose.
Grain was also posing a problem. Moisture content had gone down to 21% but heavy rain on Saturday had seen it shooting up again, meaning more work for the dryer if it was harvested.
Listening to Sam, you felt he was not complaining just for complaining's sake. Hopefully things will improve and we'll be able to get our harvest in without the same troubles on this side of the Irish Sea.

Music On The Moss: Not everyone likes cover versions. In the early days they were a way of English artists getting a quick hit with an insipid version of an American rock-n-roll original. But the attitude of the singer recording the cover makes a difference.
I bought the last of the Johnny Cash American series of recordings recently, chosing from the five in the series mainly to see how he handled two non-original songs on V, the fifth in the series.
I first heard Gordon Lightfoot's If you could read my mind when it was released in 1972, light and optimistic, realistic in the belief that if love doesn't work out there is time for a young man's heart to heal in the future. Cash's version, though, is the aching of a much older man, who knows that he's said farewell to his last taste of love, the heartache in his voice real and compelling. Rick Rubin's production lays Cash's vocals and his feelings bare in an intimate fashion that borders on the insensitive yet it is this quality which both men have been aiming for; you could call it truth, an honesty that a younger singer could never summon. It's certainly compelling.
Cash has a more optimistic view of Rod McKuen's Love's been good to me. He's looking back at a life that has seen happiness and fulfilment, content to have tasted his chances rather than wasted them.
McKuen originally wrote the song for Sinatra [Cash sings Sinatra - a rare thought there!] but I saw him sing too many years ago when he toured England. He, too, took an optimistic, grateful view of the song with its lyrics about loves long gone in happier times.

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It's not every day ....

• Tags:
• False Knight
• Maddy Prior
• Steeleye Span
• Tim Hart

Posted by Cliff Birchall on August 27, 2008 4:26 PM

Every day I go across the Moss.
Some days the Moss comes to the office.
Or what could be thriving out there.
In fact, it was thriving in Jack Richardson's garden.
But what was lurking in the undergrowth of Palmer Crescent had him baffled.
After all, what is as thick as your finger, even longer, and has four false eyes at its sharp end?
Jack didn't know. Nor did his pals who tried to find out on the interweb.
So he brought it into Elbow Lane.
A little bit more research on the interweb threw up the answer.
It was an elephant hawk moth catepillar.
It was a great thing, too. When walking it stretched out to around six or seven inches. When worried, it retracted its head and thrust up its "shoulders" with the double pair of false eyes, hoping to scare off any predators.
Now Jack has returned it to the undergrowth where, hopefully, it will pupate over winter and in spring emerge as a beauitful lilac/pink moth with a wingspan of 70mm.
What a beauty.

Music On The Moss: Perhaps it's a good tune for a reporter in transit, False Knight On The Road. I've been listening to two versions of it this week. One by Tim Hart and Maddy Prior when they were a duo on the folk circuit, the other when they were part of Steeleye Span.
The first showcases Maddy Prior's heavenly voice as she composes a slow version over the twinkling accompaniment of Appalachian dulcimer. The second is faster, grittier, with Martin Carthy's voice twinkling at the ironies in the lyrics while the electric accompaniment gives it a hefty punch.
TH&MP were a favourite of mine from the late sixties and SS produced some great music, although I've rather lost touch with them in their present days.

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Hidden places

• Tags:
• casidy
• jefferson airplane
• kantner
• kaukonen
• slick

Posted by Cliff Birchall on August 14, 2008 4:35 PM

There are one or two places on my route to work which always fascinate, not so much for their beauty or grandeur but because they are so well hidden.
If we were using the locomotion of years ago [horses or shank's pony] this would not be the case.
But the motor car has the annoying habit of speeding you past those interesting places.
All you have time to do is to have a brief look as you past, your overall picture of it being built up over weeks if not months.
As the seasons change there is so much more to take in.
I thought that this morning when I was able to have a good look at the site [when three tractors are stopped in front of you waiting to join a major road you fortunately have no option but to stop and look around].
The place I refer to is a little triangular copse. In winter it is a bare, deserted place. Light is dappled through the taller trees and it always seems deserted of birdlife.
As spring turns into summer to becomes a completely different place. While leaves of weeds and saplings push up in the middle, the outer boundary becomes a wall as the trees burst into leaf.
But when I was stopped in the queue I could see that the interior was a carpet of nettles around the edges, with other smaller plants in the centre. Ivy was growing up the trees, one plant making use of another.
But then the tractor convoy was on the move, I was, too, and I had to leave the scene until my next pass.
Perhaps I'll have the chance to stop again when autumn is painting it in a different fashion.
Music on the Moss: There is nothing like a happy noise, and they don't come much happier than Jefferson Airplane's 1969 live album, Bless its pointed little head.
It is one of my favourite albums and just oozes energy and good times. The blending of Grace Slick's voice with that of Marty Balin is nearly ethereal - in a heavy way. Their voices rise and fall against each other's on Somebody to Love and Balin's composition Plastic Fantastic Lover.
Spencer Dryden's drumming is energetic and drives the band along, while Jorma Kaukonen's guitar screams and whips along wicked lead lines. Jack Casidy is one of my favourite bass players and he thunders away, moving the basslines into and out of the limelight with ease, oiled with the eprfection that only practice brings. Paul Kantner's writing and rhythm guitar helps them to storm along on a selection of songs that give new life to Fred Neil's folk classic Other side of this life and Donovan's song Fat Angel.
www.jeffersonairplane.com

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Sorry I'm late, but ...

Posted by Cliff Birchall on August 8, 2008 3:30 PM

It must be one of the most-used excuses trotted out by everyone from the excuse-laden executive to the timorous teaboy.
"I got behind a tractor!"
Well, expect more of it in the next few weeks.
You'll have noticed from the straw in the road that farmers have already begun their cereal harvest. A couple of fields have yielded to the combine already and straw bales are now being carted from field to barn. Don't blame the farmer if you get behind one - he's on his way to work, too!
Just a week ago a couple of fields of spuds at Downholland Cross were being picked. Now the field is tilled again, ready for the next crop. In the meanwhile, gulls are enjoying combing the broken soil for whatever they can find.
A field nearby has seen a growing team turning up to take curly lettuce that have rounded up nicely in all this warm and wet weather we have been having.
I'm pleased to have seen a couple of fields of oats roundabout, too. It was once a staple crop in these parts, mainly because it was grown as provender for the draught horses who did all the work on the land before the advent of the tractor. I'm hoping that somewhere someone will be growning a bit of barley as I always think that is a lovely cereal to look at, with its beard weighing it down.
Wheat ears are beginning to droop a little now, too, as they reach maturity. Farmers will be waiting for it to acheive its correct levels for humidity and so on [farming's all hi-tec now, you know, and everything is tested scientifically] before bringing it in.
There has not been much to report on the wildlife front recently. Woodpigeons are still exploding merrily from the hedgerows with no thought for where they're going. Over at Downholland the other night I was watching a crowd of 50 or so swallows really laying into the cornflies over a field of wheat. Their acrobatics re only matched by bats, and I love watching those, too, especially the ones which swoop in, round, over and through my garden in the dusk.
Music On The Moss: there can't be many cowboys born in the city but Rambling Jack Elliott is one. Modelling himself on Woody Guthrie, he learned to pick guitar and search out old songs from old cowboys and toured Europe and America telling tales and making music. Young Brigham is his album I've just been listening to, one which he made when he had been cut free from the constraints of a label which wanted him to do more of the same.
He tackles the Stones' Connection with a vengance, and comes up with what he calls the only night herding song a cowboy would ever sing round cattle - all the others would be likely to spook the longhorns, which panicked at the slightest provocation - as well as the first song he wrote himself, 1912 Greens. It's a spoken blues-type, though it's not sad at all, just a fond looking back at a visit with guitarist Billy Fahr to a house at 1912 Toulouse Street in New Orleans and the events that happened there. His rickety guitar backing adds to the sense of homeliness that RJE engenders.
Speaking of Rambling Jack, isn't the interweb a wonderful thing? Seaching on it just brought up another Rambling Jack, real name Edmond Houlihan. A Fenian, he was blinded in a fight and had to go about earning his living playing the fiddle at fairs and suchlike. According to the article, "The anti-recruiting ballad is one of the great strains of Irish resistance songs. The story is told that in Ferbane, County Offaly, Rambling Jack defied the British Army when he sang an anti-recruiting song as a recruiting meeting was about to begin in the main street. The song was one of the finest, Patrick Sheehan, by Charles Joseph Kickham, the Tipperary Fenian who was the foremost writer on the IRB newspaper The Irish People. Both Kickham, who was partially blind and deaf, and Edmond Houlihan, would have identified with the character in this song, a young Irishman blinded fighting in the British Army in the Crimea." He died aged 92 in 1931, having lost his sight in a battle in 1867. From then on until his death his fiddling playing and Republican ballad-singing was all that kept him going.
There, we've all learnt something. No doubt there are more Rambling Jacks around if we did but know it.

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