990918.1337 watermill , st mary’s

in my tent . the equinoctial gales have arrived . i have detected a sense of expectation since i returned to the islands on wednesday . yesterday there was open speculation on whether the winds would come for the weekend . i was in the workshop until about one this morning ( yeah , my sorry existence ) . around ten o’clock fitful squalls began to whip around the roof and windows . by the time i’d biked back to the cabin , baked a mackerel and got to bed it was four and the wind was building steadily .

it reached a peak between ten and eleven this morning . i was woken by the roar of it tearing through the trees and the rain lashing against my tent , its panels bucking and shaking . for the first time i felt anxious about whether the outer canopy would be torn away , but it is a sturdy construction ( though less watertight than i hoped ) and soon i drifted back to sleep .

the wind has subsided a little now , though it may rise again later . the rain has gone and intermitently there is sun . but over the last couple of weeks there is no mistaking that autumn has come . the air has a hint of chill in it , the bracken is red , the agapanthus stems wither , the elms shed their leaves . what a glorious summer this has been . everywhere there is a sense of sadness at its passing . there will still be clear-skied tranquil days , but the ferocity is gone from the sun and the sea is no longer a hospitable element . soon i will have to leave my tent for more robust accommodation . the islands’ mood changes once more .

for no reason i can fathom some people receive attached photos intact and others do not . there doesn’t seem to be any correlation to platform , mail browser , configuration or even hair colour . i have experimented with different jpeg variants to no effect . if this is affecting a significant proportion of recipients i shall stop sending images by email . to guage the extent of the problem i’d be grateful if everyone who’s receiving garbled code instead of pretty pics could let me know .

: cH

990904.0143 watermill , st mary’s

36 of my slides from the camel rock festival
http://www.charlesarmstrong.net/camelrock

and some redesigned pages for the workshop
http://www.scillonia.org.uk

tomorrow i pack up my bags and cross to the mainland for a week of fun with the school in london . more than ever i wish i could stay . i’m enjoying just about everything i’m doing here . but i go with a light heart , knowing that i shall benefit from a spell of study and city life . i shall also be able to share my birthday with my family in cornwall for the first time in many years .

but i won’t be here for the council economic development committee on tuesday , to which i’ve been invited . the next one won’t be for six weeks .

the duchy of cornwall land steward , who’s responsible for managing all duchy estate in the islands ( they own more or less everything except the freeholds around hugh town ) , put a shot across my bows a couple of weeks ago . he is objecting to the workshop being set up in mr ward’s old stable , judging it a violation of the land use clauses in the farm’s lease .

i’ve been discussing my ideas with the duchy since last september and had a meeting with mr pontin , the land steward , back in may . he’s a charming and sharp-witted fellow . several people have described coming away from meetings with him feeling happy that much has been achieved , without ever discussing what they intended to when they went into the meeting .

i wrote back to him expressing my hope that he would tolerate the situation and pointing out that it’s going to be difficult to apply conventional notions of land use to digital trades . what of the work i do on my psion at the beach , in the pub , on a boat ?

all things being equal i’ll be back on agnes for the winter , contravening someone else’s lease no doubt .

good news arrived last week . nik shultz , an interactive designer from san francisco , will be coming to work on agnes over the winter . nik’s at http://www.l-dopa.com . he’s in the final stages of organising an exhibition of cool posters from the seventies . we might even end up sharing a house , if nik can put up with the aesthetics of my workbench habitat .

i should get some kip .

: cH

990901.0243 scillonia digital workshop , st mary’s

module from sunday’s rock festival on the beach : http://www.charlesarmstrong.net/camelrock

and my black and white photos from the eclipse added to : http://www.charlesarmstrong.net/eclipse ( the lab printed the whole batch in yukky high contrast )

this is the first time i’ve ever put together a module in one sitting . i found it quite exhilarating . my first serious test of dreamweaver . there are already a couple of things about it which annoy me , but overall i think it’s fantastic .

now i can sleep .

: cH

990828.0331 watermill , st mary’s

it’s been an awesome day . i crossed to agnes at tea time to see mike , christine and johann . i also had time for a quick swim off covean , my first for many months . i joined johann in the elvira , the lovely wooden-hulled motor launch built on st mary’s in 1937 for his father , to see the evening’s gig race ( agnes fifth i think ) . then he dropped me off on st mary’s quay amidst the post-race chaos . back up at watermill i took some long exposures in the crisp cold light of a full moon .

i’ve just discovered this snippet in my psion’s draft email folder . i wrote it sitting on the beach by the fire in the early hours of eclipse day . the festivities were in full swing and , er , i forgot all about it .

– + –

990811.0240 tean

an uninhabited island . a beach . two driftwood fires a hundred yards apart . maybe about thirty people . a clutch of boats in the bay . a dozen tents on the foreshore .

i left st mary’s about quarter to nine . an interesting journey . everything’s beautiful .

: cH

990826.2346 scillonia digital workshop , st mary’s

for the record i should note that i have been through a cycle of intense doubt over the last week , feeling entirely uncertain about my abilities and prospects . perhaps i need to go through this from time to time to clear my head , but it is never a pleasant experience . gaz and button had to put up with me glooming around last night . during these periods i experience both clarity and fear before my customary faith kicks back in , as it happily did today .

the picture shows how my work table looks right now ( or in fact seven minutes before i started writing ) . it doesn’t take long for me to deposit sufficient layers of material to entertain a team of archeologists for several weeks .

this evening’s rehearsal with steve and ben was great , though neighbourly considerations kept me from playing my horn after ten . i tried stuffing some padding up the bell and playing under my coat , but still the thing produced far too much noise . the new song seems to work but i may find myself having to sing it on sunday , a prospect which fills me with dread . nick dropped in towards the end of the session and we walked in the light of a near-full moon out over porth hellick downs to watch the sea shimmering below us . i took a few long exposures . beautiful night .

: cH

990825.0241 watermill , st mary’s

in my tent . a long , slowly-intensifying peal of thunder . perhaps forty seconds from beginning to end . a storm has been building for the last couple of days . strange weather . the cumulo nimbus were massing yesterday evening .

a forceful tirade of rain on the tent . it has been coming and going , building up , for the last half hour . the thunder is closer now .

i biked up from old town to the workshop about an hour ago

the rain intensifies further
a flash of lightning bright enough to see over the torchlight

the islands have been submerged in a fog bank for the last couple of days .
occasionally it disperses completely in the course of half an hour

more lightning
i could tell the direction so it must be forking
it came from behind me , through the trees
probably striking up at telegraph
the highest point on the island
the radio masts which stand there must get fried all the time

then returns just as mysteriously a little later . the islands are notorious for their fogs . quite as many vessels have foundered in these conditions as in storms . but this is only the second or third one i’ve seen this year .

i stuck my sax in my rucksack and biked down to old town after supper to try out some stuff with ben on his digerido ( he told me its much better aboriginal name but i’ve forgotten it already ) . on monday night i had a splendid little jam with ben and steve on bass and guitar respectively . along with gaz and his drums we’re getting together a song for sunday’s open-air festival on porth hellick . hope the weather comes round a bit , particularly since i’m missing notting hill carnival to be here ( the best thing which happens in london ) .

cycling back up from old town was very mysterious . the fog lay swirling over the ground and somewhere in the sky was a bright moon . quite enough light to cycle without lamps . i stopped to take some photographs before realising that my camera was still in my smaller backpack . the one time i decide to leave it behind . typical . whenever i relax my policy of having it with me at all times i find myself in a situation where i desperately want it .

oh dear . my tent’s leaking .

: cH

990816.2023 scillonia digital workshop , st mary’s

so there was this eclipse thing . i can’t pinpoint when i first heard about it . was it last year or the year before ? at some point it just became part of the landscape . i recall friends in cornwall talking about it last summer but i can’t remember anyone in the islands mentioning it until a few months ago . certainly it didn’t cross my mind when i decided to spend the year here .

it must have been april or may when i twigged that these islands would be the first place in the world over which the moon’s shadow would pass . that was quite a thrill .

everybody here affected long-suffering contempt for the phenomenon , at least until the beginning of last week . the < eclipse shades > went on sale in the co-op soon after easter , or so it seemed . but to be caught looking at them with any hint of interest was an invitation for ridicule or worse . then the booklets appeared : < all about the eclipse > , < how to observe the eclipse > , < 101 things to do during the eclipse > , < patrick moore’s eclipse facts > . then the stunt merchandising : eclipse biscuits , eclipse sweatshirts , eclipse umbrellas .

this , of course , was but a pale reflection of the venal horror infesting cornwall over the water . no business , it seems , was too feebly connected to the cosmic events to justify its renaming . in the course of my transitory passages through the county i catalogued builders , pet-shops , employment agencies , confectioners all gleefully jumping on the band-wagon and appending the < e > word to their previously sensible , mundane names . meanwhile the county’s proud population moved en-masse out of their homes into tents and sheds , advertising every available space in which a bed could be crammed at extravagant prices .

then the council started getting twitchy about several million hippies , druids , astronomers and other weirdos descending on the county all at once , partying wildly for a day or two , desecrating every last standing stone then buggering off . so they hired an old brigadier and got working on a * strategy * . their brainwave was a decree that nobody could come to cornwall for less than a week , which i thought showed a splendid grasp of human nature . then stories started circulating in the press that cornwall would be a disaster zone and the madness really began . the council launched an attack on andrew george , mp for st ives and the isles of scilly , blaming him for scaremongering . an advertising campaign was cobbled together proclaiming that < the rumours saying that cornwall is full for the eclipse are untrue > ( inspiring message that ) . the coastguard was put on comedy alert . extra police and army detachments were called in . eye surgeons were standing by at every clinic in the county . every historic feud between farmers and the planning authorities was reignited as turnips were decisively abandoned in favour of caravans and tents .

my god , it must have been horrible over there . my poor sister anna works in falmouth tourist information centre and she’s seen the worst of it . cornwall so monumentally mismanaged its communications strategy that the majority of enquirers genuinely believed that falmouth was the only place you could see the totality . jeez . i wrote to the old brigadier last september suggesting a web-based information campaign which would also take advantage of the opportunity for cornwall to present a new image to the world and shuck its awful baggage of ice-cream , caravans and piskies . ah , he replied , it’s all in hand . unfortunately the site he was referring to was entirely devoted to hard-selling accommodation and eclipse merchandise . nice one cornwall .

but where was i ? oh yes . out here in the islands nobody really bothered much about it . all available accommodation had already booked by the middle of last year ( part of the reason i’m living in a tent ) and anyone who tried to book tickets on the ferry , plane or helicopter was asked difficult questions about where they would be staying . the islands’ two policemen were given < special powers > , and i am sad to say that one of them got all-too-visible pleasure from reminding anyone he could collar of this fact . but hey , he’s new here …

finally , the weekend before the big day , people started shyly asking one another < so , er , where are you going to be on wednesday morning ? > . replies were generally mumbled and non-committal . i’ve commented before on the general aversion to planning in the islands . the eclipse provided a beautiful illustration . i genuinely think people were disconcerted by the fact that they knew this event would be happening on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time . the world’s just not like that here , such precision seems almost unnatural . so they kind of ignored it as far as possible .

for myself , i got it into my head a few weeks ago that the place to be was an uninhabited rock out in the western isles called rosevear . there’s not much there . the ruin of a hut where the men who built the bishop rock lighthouse lived during its construction . supposedly there’s a well somewhere too . but rosevear is just about the farthest west piece of land on which it is possible to set foot , and therefore the very very first place to see the eclipse . in my research i’d read of a party which took place there at the end of the last century to celebrate the completion of the lighthouse . accounts speak of a band , coloured lights , everyone dressing up . to stage a second party one hundred years later had a certain romantic appeal .

meanwhile i began to hear other suggestions : a band on samson , a vigil on st helen’s , a sailing trip over to annett , a boat out to bishop rock , dancing round the old man of gugh . but nobody was making any firm commitments of course .

last tuesday , the day before the eclipse , was clear-skied and hot . i cycled down to meet my friend kirmo , arriving from finland on the noon boat . hugh town was swarming with visitors and there was a heady atmosphere . i think kirmo found it a little perplexing at first that i had no idea where we’d be the next day , but he’s been to the islands before and soon got back into the swing . through the afternoon we laid in supplies and discussed plans with everyone we met . finally things began to crystalise . i’d pretty much abandoned rosevear already . ross and keith , both of whom had landed there before , told me it could only be attempted in totally flat sea ( a rare enough occurrance out in the western rocks ) and was a tricky business even then . we bumped into ben and tonya from agnes at the sailing centre on porthmellon , trying on wetsuits . they and joffy were planning to sail over to annett which , short of rosevear , would be the farthest west piece of land . but a group of boaties were planning to cross either to st helens or tean that evening and stay overnight and this seemed an increasingly attractive idea .

so kirmo and i biked back up to watermill , emptied my tent of its futon and various gubbins , packed it up and stowed everything we would need in our backpacks . everything was ready around eight , at which point i phoned james watt , with whom we were hoping to travel , to discover that he and his friends weren’t going after all . oops , a bit of a set-back . but we biked with our luggage down to porthmellon and managed to get ourselves into a boat headed for tean ( which had emerged as the chosen isle ) .

the crossing was quite magical , as were the night’s revelries . and the eclipse itself was one of the strangest things i have ever experienced .

ps – as far as i know ben hicks was the first person in the world to see the eclipse from land . nice work mate !

: cH