Open gardens, poorly turtles and other things

Yesterday was the first day of the bi-annual Open Gardens weekend. I have always enjoyed this event, but yesterday was more than slightly fraught.

I have just spent a happy half hour listening to British Sea Power and leafing my way through Menagerie Manor by Gerald Durrell trying to find a specific quote that seems ridiculously appropriate to describe the events of yeasterday. But Sod's Law applies (as it so often does), and I can't find it. But the quote reads something like this:

"Animals, like humans, get ill. But they seem to choose the worst possible time in which to do so".

Flump, the softshelled turtle who has been living quite contentedly at room temperature (in the summer) in my varied premises for five or six years, decided yesterday (in front of a party of old-aged-pensioners from Ilfracombe) that it was time to get a chill and become seriously ill. Luckily (for everyone involved) we had a couple of friends of mine from the zoo mafia on hand, and crisis was averted. This morning she is back to her old self, she tried to bite me, and has tucked into a dinner of prawns like they were going out of fashion. But it was not an auspicious way to launch the first public outing of the CFZ museum.

For, after two years of the top of the CFZ grounds looking like a cross between a particularly unsalubrious building site, and a First World War battleground, the CFZ Museum is finally open for business, albeit in a fairly rudimentary state.

We had about 40 visitors, and even sold a book, so we must be doing something right, and I am limbering up for day 2 of the Open Gardens weekend, which starts in about fifteen minutes..

Hey Ho, Let's Go!

For those of you interested..........

Here is this year's Weird Weekend poster.....



....and yes it IS a little girl dressed as Captain Beefheart!

HERE WE GO, HERE WE GO, HERE WE GO ad infinitum

Life is too bloody complicated.

So much is happening at the moment that it is almost too much to take in, let alone document on my sadly neglected bloggything. However, the boys are off to Russia amidst a flurry of terrorist alerts and other high jinks that I am not - at present - at liberty to talk about. You can follow their adventures on The Expedition Bloggything . They leave tomorrow evening, and I expect the first bulletin, telling us that they have, at least, made it through immigration at Moscow, early on sunday.

I am sitting in the office at the zoo at the moment. All the staff have become very fond of Richard in the short time that he has been Head Keeper, and are anxiously looking forward to news from the expedition.

In the midst of this, building work on the museum is just about completed, and we have moved the first four exhibits in; Flump the Chinese softshell turtle, Myrtle the Amboina box turtle, one of our amphiumas (Gumbo), and the alligator softshell. I am sitting here atb the zoo frantically trying to work out where to put a second softshell that we recklessly said that we would have months ago....

And on top of everything, my new book `Island of Paradise` is out next week.

Bloody hell I am exhausted...see u soon

More on the Mystery Animals of the British Isles series...

Mike's book is being printed as we speak. I am extremely pleased with the cover, so here is a sneak preview...



The publishing information for the first volume is as follows:
ISBN: 978-1-905723-29-4
Title: The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Northumberland and Tyneside
Author: Hallowell, Michael J
The book will be available in the next few days.

We are proud to announce the authors of the next few volumes, which will be published in the next twelve months or so:

The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Kent by Neil Arnold
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Dorset by Jonathan McGowan
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Staffordshire by Nick Redfern
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Co Durham and Humberside by Mike Hallowell
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Greater London by Neil Arnold
The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Devon and Cornwall by Jonathan Downes


I hope that you will agree with us that this is an extremely worthwhile series, and I hope that you will decide to support us...

Light at the end of the bleeding tunnel

This has been a ridiculous year so far! I took on far too much work at the end of 2007 and I just simply haven't stopped. As of today, so far in 2008 we have released:

10 books
2 issues `Exotic Pets`
1 issue `Animals & Men`
5 20-30 minute webTV shows
14 live broadcasts
1 full length documentary (am hour and three quarters)
plus I have written original music for most of the above.

I am bloody exhausted!

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and I am nearly in a position where I can rest back on my laurels and shout WOO HOO at my own cleverness.

One thing is sure: I am never gonna take on a workload like that again! However, a lot of it has been one offs. For example, the Yearbooks. This year I have restored, and remastered (and in several cases drastically re-edited six of the CFZ Yearbooks (with one left to go), and these will never have to be done again. By next week I hope that the entire run of CFZ Yearbooks from 1996-2008 will all be out inmatching paperback editions, and that I can then quietly forget about them.

The next regular book to come out is an exciting one, and the genesis of this particular project goes back over twenty years!

More years ago than I care to remember, my first wife bought me a birthday present. It was a book about the mystery animals of Britain and Ireland, and I devoured it avidly. When I finished, I was horribly disappointed. It had covered the mystery cats of the country in some depth, as it had done with the black dog legends, and a smattering of more arcane `things` (as the late, great Ivan T. Sanderson would doubtless have dubbed them) such as the Owlman of Mawnan, and the Big Grey Man of Ben McDhui. But there was so much that I knew that the author had simply left out.

Where were the mystery pine martens of the westcountry? Where were the Sutherland polecats? Where was the mysterious butterfly known as Albin’s Hampstead Eye? This was an Australian butterfly, the type specimen of which was caught in a cellar in Hampstead (hence the name) but no-one knows how or why? Where were the butterflies, moths, birds and even mammals known from the British Isles on the basis of a handful of specimens only? And where were the local oddities; the semi-folkloric beasts only known from a specific location.

Although at the time I had no pretensions to being a writer, I started to collect information from around the country, and with the benefit of hindsight it is probably with my disappointment with my 27th birthday present that the seeds of what would eventually grow into the Centre for Fortean Zoology were planted.

Nearly twenty years later to the day, I was sat in my garden at the Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] in North Devon, sharing a bottle of wine with my wife Corinna, and my old friends Richard Freeman and Mike Hallowell. The subject of my disappointing 27th birthday present came up, and someone suggested that we do our best to redress the balance. CFZ Press, the publishing arm of the CFZ, has become the largest dedicated fortean zoological publishers in the world, and we are now in the position to put my vague daydreams of a couple of decades ago into action. We decided that rather than trying to publish one enormous tome covering the mystery animals of the whole of the British Isles (which, by the way, geographically, if not politically, includes the Republic of Ireland, but excludes the Channel Islands) we would be much happier presenting this vast array of data in a series of books, each covering a county or two. Then we realised the enormity of what we were proposing: The series would probably end up being something in the region of forty volumes in length!

However, never ones to back away from a challenge, we decided to go ahead with the project, and now - six months later - the first books in the series are being published.

It seems fitting, that - as he was there at the inception - Mike Hallowell should have the honour of being the author of the first book in the series. I am glad that he is, because it is a stonker!

We argued the toss for months over how we were going to format the series. For a long time we were intending to have a rigid format for all the books, somewhat akin to the Observer’s books of the British countryside. But then we decided `No`. There are as many kinds of researcher as there are mystery animal, and it would - we felt - be more in keeping with the ethos of the CFZ, if we allowed each researcher to present his or her findings in their own inimitable style. The books, therefore, will reflect the character of the individual author.

Some will be poetic verging on mystical. Some will be matter of fact scientific. Some will be from the point of view of a naturalist, and some from the point of view of a folklorist. Some will be short, some will be long. Some will be full of scientific theorising, and some full of metaphysical speculation. But one thing is sure: Whoever gets one of these volumes for their 27th birthday present…..

....They won’t be disappointed!

In other CFZ related news, the museum really is nearly finished. The first birds will be going in the aviary block today, and - all things being equal - the first exhibits will be going into the museum building itself at the weekend. It will be another few weeks before it is respectable enough to receive visitors, but once again there IS light at the end of the tunnel.

Soon the CFZ (or at least me, Graham, Corinna and Oll) will be able to get back to being researchers, rather than builders and printers. Richard, however, is off on another expedition imminently, but THAT is another story...

Guyana: The Savage Land

At last! The Guyana movie - our first feature-length documentary was finished a week ago, and it has taken this long for me to get it online. I am very proud of the results, and I hope that you enjoy it as well....

It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it...

Once upon a time, when the world was young, or at least when I was, there was a spectacularly inept punk band called The Desperate Bicycles, who released a magnificently pointless single called The Medium was Tedium. The music was skeletal, based around a one and a half chord organ riff, echoed by a deliciously inept bass guitar line. The main crux of the lyric, indeed the only crux of the lyric, was that anybody could make a record - "it was easy, it was cheap, go and do it!"

The band maintained that the only reason that they formed was to make a record, and show that anybody could do it. It was the perfect visualisation of Andy Warhol's oft repeated concept that "anybody can be famous for 15 minutes".

I don't think that even Warhol himself ever visualised the current state of affairs with the mass media, whereby not only can anybody claim their allotted 15 minutes, but that the media would feed upon this, and become completely out of control. We now live in a world where not only can anybody become a star, but the people who do become stars seem to do so by virtue of their overwhelming mediocrity.

Paris Hilton is a star for Christ's sake. The bar has become that low.

But all this has been said before. The Internet is full of middle-aged men like me moaning into their computers about the depressing state of affairs which is the world of faux celebrity, a well-known band half my age recently released a song which bemoaned the fact that "everything is average nowadays", and one other middle-aged git adding his two penn'orth to the argument will make not a jot of difference. I am rapidly turning into my father. I remember, back in 1973, when my father was the age that I am now, that he was wont to spend Sunday lunchtimes complaining about the world which the younger generation had created, and although as I approach 50 years old I find myself becoming more and more of a cliche every day, I don't want to go the whole hog just yet. Okay, each year there is less and less that I want to watch on television, and the little bits that I watch by mistake seem fashioned with only one idea in mind; to give people like me high blood pressure and incipient apoplexy, but I can always read a book, and usually do.

No, the reason that I'm bothering to write this blog entry, is not so that I can vent my spleen upon media nonentities such as Paris Hilton, Jade Goody, and their ilk, because I have a far more serious adversary than merely taking pot shots at a gaggle of ill-educated, slutty, and vulgar nonentities. My bete noir is the media itself. And more exactly, the people who work within it.

I have been making films for TV companies around the world for 15 years now, and whereas, a lot of the time, it has been an exciting, and even uplifting experience, ever since the beginning I have noticed a particularly disturbing syndrome within media types. Furthermore, this syndrome seems to be spreading faster and faster, and threatens to become almost ubiquitous. Media people - on the whole - have absolutely no fucking manners!

I have spend most my adult life doing my best to be a gentleman, and although anybody who knows me will be perfectly aware that on occasions I have been, and will continue to be, incredibly rude to some people, I have always remembered my father's axiom that a gentleman is somebody who is never unintentionally rude to anyone.

I certainly have always done my best to treat eyewitnesses, and fellow researchers courteously. I am perfectly aware that when making films things don't always run to schedule. However, if I'm going to be late, or - worse - am going to have to reschedule, I will always make sure that the person whom I am inconveniencing has a convincing apology, and quite often a bunch of flowers.

One would have thought that this would be standard practice within the media. After all, logic tells us that a service industry so ephemeral would have to rely - to a greater or lesser extent - on the goodwill of its consumers.

Ha bloody Ha!

Over the past 15 years the mass media has brainwashed its audience so thoroughly that practically everybody in this poor benighted country has only one ambition - to be a star! When I was a kid in primary school if you had asked a class of seven-year-olds what they wanted to be when they grew up, some would have wanted to be soldiers, some train drivers, some farmers. I wanted to be a monster hunter, and to own a zoo. These days the vast majority of the poor little sods want to be television presenters.

An acquaintance of mine has an eight-year-old daughter. She has two imaginary friends (like little girls have always had), but with a difference: her imaginary friends are Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie. Two brainless little pop tarts. The cult of celebrity is so ubiquitous that it has even infected the voice recognition software that I'm using to dictate this rant. Whilst the software does not recognise the words `praying mantis`, or `katydid` the names: `Paris Hilton` and `Nicole Ritchie` are hard wired into the original programming.

Because the mass media - knowingly, or not - have now got the vast majority of the population of the United Kingdom exactly where they want us, they can do exactly what they like, and they can treat people in as cavalier a fashion as they wish.

We get approached by TV production companies at least once a week, and at least once a month a representative from one of these companies comes to visit us, and promises us the moon on a stick. They all want to do the same thing. They all want unparalleled access to one of our expeditions. They all want free access to our - after nearly 20 years - sizeable archive of photographs and video footage. They all want to spend hours interviewing me and the boys about what we do. And they quite often - because cryptozoology (another word which the voice recognition software significantly failes to recognise) is lumped in their eyes together with the more colourful aspects of the lunatic fringe - want to film us wearing silly hats, jumping out of bushes, or parading around the garden wearing pith helmets.

I am always polite to these people, and when - occasionally - I am mildly impressed by their professional pedigree, I co-operate with them to a certain extent. I refuse to do anything stupid, and forbid the boys to do anything stupid either, but on at least four occasions in the last 12 months, I have put in large amounts of time and effort into helping someone from a media production company to put together a programme submission.

On each of these occasions, the producer/director/researcher has gone back to London, and - over the next week or so - followed up his visit with a string of long and exhaustive telephone calls. On each of these occasions, I have been assured that the senior commissioning editor from Channel 4/Living TV/BBC2/Animal Planet/Discovery Channel has assured them that the decision-making process is a mere formality, and that we are just about to be the subjects of a lucrative, and career changing TV documentary. On each of these occasions, the telephone calls have simply fizzled out, and I never hear anything from them again.

On other occasions, they make appointments, and simply don't turn up. When they do turn up, it seems that the days of being paid for contributing to a TV documentary are a thing of the past. If I had a fiver for each time I am told "we can't pay you for your photographs, but we may be able to put your website in the credits", then I would be significantly richer than I am now. If these people looked as if they really were running on a tight budget then I might feel sorry for them, but they turn up in expensive cars, wearing clothes but I certainly can't afford, and boasting about their expense account lunches, the limo that takes them into the studio, and the fact that they flew to Los Angeles the week before last for a commissioning conference.

Well screw you. I have had enough of being exploited by an increasingly soulless and self-serving hegemony. I, too, am a filmmaker. A film we put out last year has been seen by over 30,000 people - the sort of viewing figures that some minor cable TV channels would kill for. Over a thousand people a month watch my monthly WebTV show - not astounding figures, but perfectly respectable, especially when one considers that it is made on a budget of practically nothing. Things are only going to get better. I am rapidly beginning to think that I don't need the mass media. And when I look at the mass media, and the soul destroying, vapid nonsense that it spouts out for an increasingly undemanding audience of morons, the more I begin to feel morally uncomfortable with being a part of it.

The conventional record business has collapsed. Musicians and songwriters now know that they do not need to sell out to what George Harrison once described as the "old grey buggers of Manchester Square" in order to sell their music. Authors, and small publishers like ourselves have discovered that we no longer need to put ourselves through the soul destroying process of kowtowing to a major book publisher in order to get our books into the marketplace. We no longer have to submit to editing by focus group, stupid changes of title in order to fit in with the dictats of somebody else's marketing department. And we no longer have to accept royalty rates of 25p for each book sold. We can do for ourselves. The Desperate Bicycles were about 30 years too early, but now what they said in 1977 is true. It is easy. It is cheap. We can go and do it for ourselves!

In October 2006 we were in the Lake District making a film called Eel or No Eel about the giant eel sightings from Windermere and Coniston water. The local BBC telephoned me out of the blue and insisted on speaking to our health and safety officer. What on earth are you talking about? I asked. "Well, if you want us to come out on the lake with you, in time to make it on this evening's news, we will have to review your health and safety procedures". What on earth you talking about? I reiterated. He repeated exactly the same thing. I knew nothing about any scheduled TV appearance and told him. "But of course you want to be on television" he insisted, "otherwise what would be the point of you being here?" I told him that I didn't care whether we were on television or not. And tried to reason with him that we were there on a mission of investigation, not on a search for spurious sell publicity. "But everybody wants to be on television" he insisted, "let me speak to your health and safety officer".

"No" I said, and put the phone down, and returned to the task at hand.

Two minutes later he phoned back. "Everybody wants to be on television" he insisted in an increasingly hysterical voice. "Don't be so bloody stupid" I said, and turned my telephone off.

Two hours later, the crew who had driven like madmen from Manchester turned up completely uninvited, and once again insisted on viewing our health and safety procedures. Half an hour later an enormous truck festooned with satellite dishes turned up, and then a sports car containing a blonde bimbette who was planning to make amusing comments about our activities for the studio audience.

"But I don't want to do an interview" I said. "Before we start, can I see your health and safety procedures", she said. "I am not interested in appearing on your programme" I said. "But everyone wants to be on television", she said with what she fondly imagined was a winning smile. I will draw a discreet veil over what happened next. But like Rottweilers on an inner-city housing estate, they got most of what they wanted. With the worst possible grace I gave them an interview.

A few weeks ago I had an unfortunate experience with a camera crew from one of the Bristol based TV stations who wanted to talk to me about mystery cats. Springing it upon me that they needed to film that very afternoon, and they insisted that I be in Somerset at three o'clock. This is impossible, I said, because it is a two-hour drive, and I had an appointment in Bideford 1.30. This person would not accept this, and became increasingly rude. When I finally arrived - at 3.45 - he had forgotten his laptop onto which I was going to transfer some video footage which - by the way - I was letting him have for nothing. He insisted that I give him my portable hard drive which he would return sometime in the next few days. I refused. It contained a number of pieces of sensitive information, including stuff I needed that very evening. He just wouldn't understand that I am not one of these people who do anything to get on television.

Yesterday I spent all afternoon waiting for an American TV crew to come and talk to me about licensing some film. They did not even do me the courtesy of telling me that they weren't going to turn up. This morning a man with a silly name telephoned my wife, and said that they would be coming today. No apology. No asking whether it would be convenient. She said that I would phone them back. I haven't bothered. If they do turn up I am not quite sure what I'm going to do.

Today I feel as mad as a bag full of cheese, and am in no mood to suffer fools - or anybody else, for that matter - gladly. If they do turn up unannounced, and uninvited, then I am sorely tempted to play them The Medium was Tedium and to tell them to commit a biologically unfeasible act of self procreation.

However, my wife is nicer than me, and is the only person in the world who can tell me what to do, and she will probably tell me not to do it. And I always do what Corinna tells me...