Tag Archives: art

Not Gardening in Eden

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Yesterday morning my daily Bible reading was Genesis, the creation story. It’s a very beautiful and mysterious story: the water was already there, it had to be gathered, there needed to be separations of many things. It never fails to move me and ignite my curiosity.

Especially yesterday, because after the Earth is full of plants and other things, dominion over them is given to the humans. I was thinking happy thoughts about the long line of connectedness with me putting in a garden, working with seeds and dirt, reaching back to God giving humans the first garden. That whole blowing it thing and the expulsion could wait. Give me my moment.

That moment was coming. Our friend Philip arrived to help, and he weeded one bed while I put up supports for peas in another. Then I went and got a truckload of dirt and compost to amend some soil; it took us 21 wheelbarrow loads to get it in the right places. By 2 pm, that 8 am “what a glorious thing to participate in” was more like “when is this going to be over.”

I doubt muscles in the Garden of Eden screamed “what the hell Lady” at Eve in the afternoon. I doubt their chickens decided eating new seed was better than eating grubs–which we were feeding them every time we found one. I know for a fact that Adam never had a blister on his baby toe from dirt getting inside his shoe and rubbing–they weren’t wearing shoes.

According to the story, at that time getting good food from the plants didn’t involve having to grow them yourself. Taking a line from Genesis, I snipped a bunch of fresh hosta shoots for dinner. Free food we didn’t grow, tasty for the taking. Philip, his partner Geoffrey, Jack and I sat down to last year’s carrots canned overwinter, the hosta shoots, and some nice Scottish Sausage patties Jack put together for us.

Go by mad world. Gardening may not be Eden, and my muscles may have the vocabulary of sailors this morning given the obscenities they are offering up with each move, but it was still fun.

RIP Davy Lockhart

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heritageJack’s guest blog about a dear friend

Davy first came into my life in the mid 1970s when he was in his early 50s and I was in my 30s. I was at a party in his house when I discovered that he had been a fiddle player as a youngster, but hadn’t kept it up. But he got out his violin and we found we could play a few tunes together.

The very first time I persuaded him to get up and play at the local folk club not long after that first party, he prepared to play the first note and promptly fainted. Half an hour later he got back up played like nothing had happened. A few years later he joined a group of us to create ‘Heritage’.

His favourite place, after Fife, was France. He famously spent 6 months there after Heritage broke up and wound up as guest fiddle player with the Occitan group ‘Los Cotillons de Tonniens’ touring all over the country with them (in costume) playing all the tunes he’d fallen in love with when Heritage had toured there many times.

Heritage spent 15 years playing traditional Celtic music at folk clubs, festivals, concert tours, radio and TV all over Scotland and Europe; Davy was an integral part of the front line for much of that time. By profession he was an internationally recognised artist with work hanging in prestigious collections all over the world, as well as a much loved art teacher in a Fife High School who certainly influenced his pupils very much for the better. But he often said that his musical career saved his sanity from the bureaucracy and politics of the Scottish education system.DSCN2126

During our travels with Heritage the stories about him abounded – from his terrible driving to his ability to fall asleep at the dinner table. He would be the first to admit that he wasn’t a great fiddle player – and yet – he helped establish the sound of the group and that didn’t change much despite various personnel shuffles over the years. The other great stories were the ones that he told – like the time he joined the Home Guard so he could have a rifle to shoot the capitalists when the war was over, and on, and on – –

Davy died peacefully in his sleep on December 28th 2014 at the age of 92 after some health issues over the last year or so.

I consider myself lucky to have known him and to have had him as a friend.