Perfect pairings

Writing a post for the blog tends to start one of two ways: I have a vague idea of a subject to write about so I write, then pop a few photos in that may (or may not) be relevant; or I have a couple of photos that I want to post and they get me going. Today you may have to bear with me, I’m not sure what this post will be about. It’s not normal for me to have it planned out before I start (as you’ll probably have gathered if you’ve read previous posts), hence the digressions, non-sequiturs and irrelevances, but today more than normal I have no idea where it’s going. Sorry if it turns out to be crap. I’ll start with a picture to cover for the lack of a proper introduction. I want to find a very fine pin and puncture each of it’s black juicy cushions.

I’m looking at the double bass that sits in the corner of the office. I don’t mean a brace of tasty oily fish, I mean one of those large wooden instruments that looks like a cello. I love my double bass. It’s very forgiving: you take its weight with one hand and thonk away randomly and it’s surprisingly easy to make a reasonable sounding racket. Very forgiving that is, until you play it in the company of another instrument.

The problem is a lack of frets – those metal lines on a guitar over which you close the string when you press your finger to the neck. Tune your guitar right and those frets give you a spot on A, up one fret to A#, and (unless you bend the string) you’ll get just pure notes, on the nose, nothing in-between. Without the frets there’s a whole lot of potential between the A and the A# – it’s a gradation – you can travel from A to A# gradually rather than abruptly. If your finger is a couple of millimetres out it’s not ‘A’ anymore. And you my friend will sound worse than Les Dawson.

Get it right and there’s not much to get near a double bass. I’ve managed to catch Danny Thompson live twice, once with Richard Thompson and once solo. He arrived late for the solo gig, his car broke down on the way. He thanked both versions of AA for him being there that evening.

Here he is playing with John Martyn. I made apple and blackberry fruit leather earlier this week and I was listening to John Martyn and Danny Thompson. I promise I registered how both pairings were far far more than the sum of their parts. Even I’m not cheesy enough to make that up as a Gary Davies-like segue in a blog. Honest.

Listening to Danny Thompson makes me want to pick up the double bass and dedicate my life to learning to play it, and at the same time place it in the path of my tractor to turn it into a thousand tiny pieces for the fire. I wasn’t born to play the double bass the way he was, the way he was born to do what he does, the way he was born to do this. I have this feeling alot.

I spend some of my week at River Cottage leading the garden team. The week before last I spent an hour taking photos in the garden in harsh light (ignoring that harsh light is no time to take photos) and was interrupted by people, the public, wandering around as if they own the place. Which they did, as it was the day of an Edible Seashore course.

John Wright runs the Edible Seashore course, along with the Mushroom course, and Edible Hedgerow course. I confess, I have openly laughed when reading a book (his book) about mushrooms. Edible Seashore is a work of gentle comedy genius. Even if you’ve absolutely no intention of foraging for a little wild food I urge you to buy them.

John and I tend to cross paths at events, promise we’ll meet up for lunch and never quite manage it. I feel ever so slightly like an imposter in his company. I’ve done what I do for a few short years; John has lived what he does for decades. I quack on a little too enthusiastically and loudly; with gentle charm and humour he captures people’s attention. I try to create something different, covering what is naturally there with something new; John inhabits the landscape he finds himself in. In harvesting from it and in knowing it so well he becomes a real part of it. It’s a beautifully light, happy coexistence. A tasty one too – seaweed, crabs and allsorts of group-foraged seashore edibles made it to the lunchtime menu. On the plus side, I’m younger than him and don’t have to go outside as much as he does in the cold months.

I’m not sure if I told him this, but I was recently in a meeting with a TV development team (don’t ask) and suggested that they pair John up with James Wong for a series – they could both go foraging and argue over whether what they found was poisonous or not. The winner of each episode would be the one who got the most correct. Obviously the series would be called Wright and Wong. They thought I was serious. I’m not even sure I’m not.