Simon's speakers

I took photographs of Simon’s speakers, which are downstairs in our basement/living room. They are very beautiful objects that he handcrafted with his friend, John, who is a carpenter. While I photographed them; getting the right set-up and focussing in on the warm wood grain, I was totally reminded of the Oceanic art-objects I pored over in my master’s degree. Specifically, malanggan from New Ireland, which are elaborately carved wooden beings that house spirits. These are ephemera that also act as agents in Melanesian society, which is what also made me think of the speakers. I mean, they’re beautifully crafted objects that house the spirit of music, and what has more agency than that? 

Simon’s speakers are what give life to parties – without them people wouldn’t want to stay downstairs, into the small hours of the morning. Whenever he plays his vinyl the housemates congregate to listen, unwittingly sometimes yet the timbre and resonance hold us there. While I took close-ups of Simon's speakers I kept in mind the story of makers in Inuit society, who extended their personhood into art-objects as they crafted them, so that the maker and the made are part of the same thing. If you didn’t do that, they said, the object would never become true.

Simon said this about making his speakers

It took me about five or six years to get all the parts, from eBay – searching online; the drivers are from America. The design is from the 1960s, these loudspeakers were the ones used for public speaking. Lots of people get the parts and make their own speakers. Once we got everything (just before my thirtieth birthday) we decided to build them. Building took about two weeks – it was quick because John ran out of space in his workshop, so for a time the speakers lived in my clinic. My patients would ask, ‘What’s that?’ when they came in to see me.

The wood is walnut and valchromat, an environmentally friendly MDF that’s coloured all the way through. Ours is yellow, so we put wood oil on it to enhance the colour – at first, we used the wrong type of oil so it went really brown, looked like a turd. We had to sand it back down and then this time we used yellow oil and it worked. It wasn’t my first choice to go for these expensive woods, and the walnut weighs a tonne, so I can’t carry the speakers around like a sound system, but John wanted to got for the aesthetic choice. Even though the speakers are really heavy they’re beautiful.

They became the object they wanted to be, I guess. They’re never leaving this room though – we got them down the stairs with about an inch to spare.

Tanabata 七夕

I celebrated Tanabata at home in South London, with my new housemates.

This is a traditional Japanese summer festival which is connected to the stars. Legend goes that there is a weaver and a cowherd up in the Heavens who fall in love. But because they fall in love so deeply, they abandon their duties. The sacred silk stops being woven and the cattle wander all over the place. The god who oversees Heaven is pretty angry, so he splits the lovers apart by the Milky Way. Now, only once a year on Tanabata are the couple allowed to meet at the stellar river. To aid them, a flock of magpies appear to create a bridge for them to cross and meet.

It’s a pretty sweet story and has a relation to the stars in our actual galaxy: Altair and Vega. These are part of the summer triangle, which are the brightest stars you can see in the northern hemisphere at this time of year. When the two stars become brightest it means that it is the height of summer, and if you are able to look at them during a dark night sky – in between Vega (the brightest of the two stars and the weaver) and Altair (cowherd) you can distinguish the Milky Way.

On Tanabata, one of the things we do is write wishes on colourful strips of paper called tanzaku, then hang them from a bamboo tree. Here is the emoji to prove it 🎋 You can wish for anything really, like passing your driving test or world peace. Whatever you want. I made somen noodles for dinner, which are thin and white and symbolise the Milky Way, while Simon fried tempura. The best combination is the crunchy fried-ness of the vegetables, dipped in the light noodle broth.

I told Obaachan about me celebrating Tanabata with friends in London. She told me that when she was a girl, she remembers her father going out on Tanabata to gather very long reeds from the river. He would sit on their front porch and wind the reeds around each other. She remembers he would weave out of the reeds two horses, then face them towards each other and bind them together with bamboo. On Tanabata he would release the two horses on to the river for them to be carried away by the water.

‘Why did he do that?’ I asked.

Obaachan makes a hmmmm sort of noise, as if both recalling and trying to work it out.

‘I wonder? It was probably something to do with the region.’ She grins, ‘They were really good horses though.’

The Creature

Moonlight

It started with moonlight. It shone so brightly that it woke me while the night was in full swing. I opened my eyes and waited to get sleepy again but decided instead to go to the bathroom. It was still a novelty to walk upstairs to the white tiled bathroom, which I think is beautiful, in the way hotels in foreign cities are. I had only just moved in. This was my third night’s sleep in clean sheets, in a room no longer filled with dust bunnies. Even though it was night – like I say – the moon was bright, pouring in through the windowpanes like muted floodlights. Outside was still; the days had been hot, and the grass had been scorched.

I stood on the staircase and looked out of the window on to our back garden. There was a small creature, sitting in an upright position on the lawn, peering back at me. At first, I thought it was a squirrel. Its coat was the right colour, grey and dusty looking. But my eyesight is very bad. Also, it was before dawn, so it was difficult to make out defining features. I thought the creature was too large for a squirrel. It may have been a tiny cat. I went back to bed.

Compost

Holly received plants from her parents. Lush basil, tender thyme, spindly mint which she planted in the wooden trough next to the rosemary bush. Annina re-planted the mint into pots of their own, because apparently, they hog water. Over the coming days I would don gardening gloves and rip out the vines, which were threatening the tomatoes and had already strangulated the lavender. I would also make compost from old soil, dead leaves, eggshells and used coffee grains.

We all had seeds to plant. I had shiso. A herb that’s used in Japanese cuisine, which taste a bit like basil and plum – the seed packet told me they were ‘erratic and unreliable’. Simon had unidentified seeds, which he scattered into free pots. Holly planted sunflowers.

Hole

The plants were growing exceedingly well. All this sunlight and humidity was sublime weather for a seed, it seemed. I had my morning coffee black, sat at the blue table in the garden in my string vest and shorts. The sunbeams drenched me at the start of the day, it was like being on holiday. We can all close our eyes and imagine we’re abroad – I remembered a friend saying during peak-lockdown. Then I noticed this hole in the lawn. A dusty puncture where yellow shoots of grass should have been.

Something had been digging!

I noticed a fallen flower head next to it. A white rose had been pulled apart, its petals strewn about, like feathers of a pigeon attack.

‘Oh my god it’s the squirrel.’

‘I thought you said it was a cat,’ Annina said from behind her book.

‘Whatever it is it’s digging holes.’

I totally believed it was doing this because of our stare-off at moonlight. My not reacting to its presence, probably gave it some perverse confidence to go ahead and dig up our garden.

The next day it was worse. The creature had only gone and dug up our basil plant! It had really gone to town and shifted all the soil back and forth, so that black earth covered the remaining herbs.

‘Fucking squirrel.’

I got the hoe and filled in the holes. I did not find any buried nuts in the process. I asked my surrogate mum Susan what to do. She gave me a gardener’s tip: spray diluted washing up liquid around the affected area because squirrels don’t like the taste of it, apparently. I didn’t do that.

The final straw was on a sunny Tuesday morning when I came out for my morning coffee. On the lawn, next to the original hole was a pile of shit.

‘Oh my god! Look what it’s done!’ I was abhorred.

‘This is definitely not a squirrel, or a cat’, Annina said. Of course, she was right, it was a fox.

Monster

‘At first it was a big squirrel, then a tiny cat and now it’s a fox?’ Simon laughs at me, ‘I just don’t trust your eyesight.’ I am now too offended by the chimera to care. Each day I go back to the trough and cover up the holes with more soil. Holly has been doing the same furtively, and so has Annina. We are fighting a losing battle. Twigs of rosemary are being snapped off in the fox’s digging routine, all of which I throw into my compost pot, dejected.

“If you can remove temptations or create an atmosphere that causes a fox to feel nervous about coming into your garden, you’re on the right track to stopping the digging and other problems that the fox is causing.”

My phone lights up with this message sent from Annina upstairs. She knows I am wildly plotting against this fox. I had the idea of putting chilli flakes into the hole, scattering them around the lawn, so maybe it would sting the fox, but Simon pointed out it would be a waste of good chilli flakes.

Showdown

The eve before Genevieve’s birthday the whole household had mysteriously, simultaneously, woken up in the early hours. I recollect hearing blood-curdling screeching from outside and turning over in my bed, so that the duvet gripped me uncomfortably. Caught in a daze, Annina had stopped on the way to the bathroom and was looking out of the window at the erratic movements of a fox.

‘She was running around in circles,’ she recounts bewildered. ‘I don’t think it was a dream. Going from here to there with wild energy, digging frantically. I saw her jump onto the trough and start digging again.’

‘I knew it.’

‘So, I opened the window and she stopped. We looked at each other for a while and I stared at her. Slowly, she retreated to the garage and climbed on to the roof and slinked away.’

‘Oh my god Annina. You did it. You won!’

I hoped the fox would be too disturbed to return to the garden. Maybe she would think twice, now that she knew there was someone here who was a worthy match, who wouldn’t let them get away with murdering our basil.

It was a glorious summer’s day. The air was pregnant with humidity, but the thunderclouds stayed away. Simon inflated two gold balloons in the shape of a number ‘3’ and ‘0’ and attached them to weights, so they could float freely in the garden. We all pitched-in to make Genevieve’s birthday magical, even under the restrictions. Annina commandeered the kitchen and whipped up a banquet. We had two equally complicated and delicious cakes. At the end of the night, after candles had been blown out and all the prosecco drunk, we placed the big shiny balloons on to the lawn next to the original hole.

‘I think this should work,’ I said firmly.

‘I hope so.’

‘Well surely. Anyway, you’ve done the hard part by scaring her off. The balloons are just extra.’

‘Good night.’

‘Night.’

 Epilogue: The fox has not been back since.