#17 A CAREER IN BROADCASTING

…the good seed on the land. Following the parable, I have been scattering the (grass) seed on stony ground,  and it turns out that just walking up and down, scattering seed by hand in a wide arc is very satisfying. When the careers master said that I might have a future in broadcasting he probably meant this, rather than the BBC. However, these pebbles are encased in the most dense, adhesive, cohesive, clinging, quicksand-like clay I’ve ever seen. And it seems to go to unfathomable depths. A local amateur historian told me why. Beyond the bottom of the garden is a Victorian railway cutting which scythed through the northern part of Willesden, then open country, yet to be blighted by the unimaginable horrors of Neasden. Being Victorians they were a bit short of JCBs, and skip-lorries to carry the displaced clay away, so they dumped it in my garden (to be). In 1911, along came the builders (as did, my father, and the Titanic, briefly) to build my house. By then the clay was lightly dusted with a layer of topsoil from all the surrounding vegetation, so they probably just chucked down a few handfuls of grass seed and went off for a pint of porter. Wind the tape on, to three weeks ago, and I have decided to give the ‘lawn’ its first mow of the year. Except that over the winter it has been colonised by an army of daisies and dandelions. A sprinkling of daisies on a lawn can look very nice, but three quarters of the surface area is a sprinkling too far. I don’t object to dandelions either: in their place, but that place is in the hooch-like dandelion and burdock wine my distant rural relatives used to brew in Wiltshire. Legend has it that they used to pour it over their corn flakes, too.

I digress. The invasion was so sudden and complete that it seemed entirely possible that they would spread indoors and strangle us in our beds, so I was determined to expel this expeditionary force and dig up every single plant, condemning myself to four days of digging, bending, lifting, sifting, and filling up heavy duty plastic rubble sacks: five of them, full to the brim and immovable because of the earth which had come along for the ride. It was this digging which exposed the clay, and the reason for the garden having been so unproductive over the 10 years I’ve been there. Not that I’ve been the most assiduous or ambitious Gardener. We tried to cultivate a vegetable patch one year, planting 5 or 6 different kinds in a decent-sized plot. The net yield was twenty potatoes. Everything else died, likely of malnutrition.

At one point I hit a very hard layer of stone seemingly set in some kind of rough concrete. I attacked it with an SDS drill to try and break it up, but was disturbed to find that the drill bit broke through something into 'fresh air.' What could it be? A chamber underground? Treasure trove that would finally buy me the Aston Martin? More likely the roof of an air-raid shelter? Quite plausible. Then the possibility that it might contain people occurred to me. This put a bit of a damper on my curiosity, because they were unlikely to be alive, 70 years on, and it would be gruesome. Maybe there was someone who’d kept themselves alive on grubs and stuff, and who didn’t know the War was over, like that Japanese soldier they found in the jungle? Or maybe – and here I could really hear the tabloid cash registers ringing – maybe I had stumbled on the last resting place of Lord Lucan, who had ridden there on Shergar?

I did have a proper gardening period: for 25 years we rented a cottage in Shropshire (see FESS, p. 147) which had an enclosed garden (dry stone walled) and the most extraordinary soil I’ve ever seen: rich, dark, moist, crumbly soil, in which you could grow anything. Digging was a pleasure, not a pain. I learnt quite a bit about gardening, and really got into it, something which I never would have anticipated as a younger person. Later I had a flat in Finsbury Park with a big terrace. I bought a lemon tree for it, and it looked quite nice but the real pleasure it gave me was that every time someone asked me what it was, I could  say "a lemon tree, my dear Watson". It's pathetic really, but I'm sure it comes as no surprise. I even picked up some Garden Latin, so that now I can tell you that despite the clay of rural Willesden, the azalea and ceanothus are showing off as usual (see below) the hebe has survived my chainsaw massacre (I get confused between pruning and felling) and thankfully, the chlamydia seems to be dying back. But thanks to Willesden’s near-tropical biosphere, the Clementine tree has produced its usual spectacular crop...

I’ve lived in NW London for 17 years and yet, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve never visited the Temple until this week. It’s the same old problem: London is so overstocked with things to do, that the permanent attractions are taken for granted and not prioritised, set aside for when this or that transient experience is no longer available (which is never), and so postponed indefinitely.

I expected something rather beautiful, but what I found was something exquisite. Mere superlatives do not get close to describing this experience and they devalue through repetition. The hand-carved wood and sculpted marble bespeak almost unimaginable levels of virtuosity, devotion, perseverance and commitment through literally millions of man-hours of dedicated work. Standing looking at a marble ceiling, so intricate that it was hard to imagine it being conceived at the level of a plan, let alone executed in three dimension, by chipping it out of marble. The very finest art and craft and the sheer enormity of the surface area carved or chiselled with intricate design is breath-taking, literally. I felt overwhelmed, almost as though I needed to vent emotion through tears. I think perhaps it takes the experience of working with wood, however crudely, to fully appreciate the sheer complicated brilliance of the carving skills, to have the pronounced reaction that I did.

The building is a feast of visual delights, to be enjoyed in the quiet, peaceful and contemplative atmosphere that the builders and the community have created in this unlikely, grubby location. Please treat yourself to this experience, it is almost unique. Ironically, a few hundred metres away from the Mandir is another temple, the IKEA shrine to bargain consumerism. What could be more of a contrast, the spiritual and the material divided only by the North Circular road. By their temples shall ye know them.

                                                    JAMIE VARDY        OLD MAN STEPTOE