Hazel Robinson

The Horticulture of Happiness

A few weeks ago, the Guardian published this (very lovely) piece on the work of botanists at the Herbarium in Kew Gardens: “Plants are not just beautiful, they help us to survive.”

It is a good piece and it discusses a field that is often overlooked, frequently patronised and generally treated as an irrelevantly twee “soft option,” largely confined to colonial-era eccentrics. This article, in the same week, highlighted that Botany has disappeared as an A-Level subject and only ten of the 115 universities in the UK offer any qualification in Plant Science. This is partly because Botany is not well-suited to universities, of course; it requires large, specialist facilities and preferably gardens like those at Kew. It needs funding to undertake huge trips across the world and although it has wide applications (medicinal science, agriculture) it doesn’t always commercialise them very well. It happens in buildings called ‘the herbarium’ or ‘the nursery’ or ‘glasshouse number nine.’ It is sometimes a little ‘hullo clouds, hullo sky.’ And if I’d told my parents I wanted to do botany at university I can’t think they would have had a reaction better than confusion; “Hazel is continuing her study of the False Banana” is hardly the stuff of round robins, that great whistle test for academic respect. So in defiance of all that an article arguing that plants are not just beautiful or twee, they help us to survive is a very good thing. more »

Hazel in FT • 1 Comment

We will make everything metal

I’ve long-yearned to write a terrible essay about how the embarassment of Nu Metal changed the face of society. The ways in which the collective falling for Limp Bizkit and Staind by the “credible” areas of music criticism only to rear their heads from the druqs-buckets long enough to be blown apart by the revelation that these baseball-cap-wearing clowns were perhaps not bringing about a revolution filled credibility with a sense of timidity and desire for lineage that ultimately and risibly resulted in a recession that allowed any idiot with a copy of ‘The Three Chord Song Book: Jam Edition’ being allowed 15 minutes of hit records.

Then I think that I should perhaps put the gin down and go to bed. Good news this week, then, when The Financial Times published this quote with regards to the current financial situation:

The situation is akin to the mosh pit at a rock concert, warns regulatory consultant Barbara Matthews. “Everyone shares the same goal amid a frenzy, but any co-ordination that occurs is coincidental, and along the way people can get hurt,” she says. “Folks in a mosh pit have fun until they get hurt. Regulators have fun using their muscle … until something comes back to bite them.”

Hazel in FT • 9 Comments

“If John Grisham had written Jurassic Park, he couldn’t do better than Tyrannosaur Canyon”

(Stephen Coonts, apparently)

I like to browse charity shops in search of amazing books. As I’m a bookseller if not by trade anymore then by something possibly stronger than genetics or space-time, this is not necessarily just a case of being pleased to find an unproofed review copy of the new China Mieville six weeks before it’s meant to come out, since the YMCA clearly don’t check that sort of thing. No, it is not just good books that I am interested in. In fact, I think I’ve possibly passed some sort of event horizon where I no longer care about “good” books because all books are part of the whole sort of general bookish thing and so it’s beyond an investment in my own literary pleasure into an investment in this whole sort of general bookish thing. All books, especially the waifs and strays, are relevant to my interests. Especially, sometimes, the really, really bad ones.*

Which is how I found myself in the aforementioned YMCA shop, West Ealing, idly browsing the racks and happened across a spine that immediately set my ‘this is unlikely to have been nominated for the Booker prize’ senses tingling. ‘TYRANNOSAUR CANYON,’ t’was. I know, with the ambiguous quote at the top of this entry, you’re probably thinking that this book doesn’t sound very amazing at all. After all, if John Grisham wrote Jurassic Park there’d probably be a lot of courtroom drama regarding the massive number of personal injury claims possible if you’ve had your legs ripped off by a velociraptor and it wasn’t your fault and then some coffee-drinking. That, though, is because I’ve deprived you of the rest of the blurb, as in actual fact the book contains- more »

Hazel in The Brown Wedge • 3 Comments

Kylie is DRONE ROCK and I HAVE PROOF

From the Board of Unnecessary Science-

1) I accidentally ended up listening to ‘Demon Cleaner’ by Kyuss when trying to listen to Kylie and didn’t notice for QUITE SOME TIME

2) Main topics of Kylie: CONTEMPLATING OUR HUMAN NEED FOR CONTACT ie: staring at your hands going ‘but look at my FINGERS, man’

3) Music for or from hot climates (mirage, fractal, repeat)

4) They’ll try to trick you into normal treatment, oh don’t you listen to them say, shush them all away; I am the demon cleaner, madman saver = popular Kylie topic ILLNESS OF THE MIND curable only by CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS eg: I just can’t get you out of my head, boy, it’s more than I dare to think about or I’m coming down with something that can’t be cured, there aint a doctor in this town who is more qualified than you to be so adored*, and things you make me do; like a druqk, like a druqk & etc. ad infinitum. more »

Hazel in FT • No Comments

Bo urr, carnt see no cowses roun ere etc.

Non-alcoholic drinks aren’t always a concern of Publog but there are perfectly good arguments for sitting in a pub and drinking them, not least because dammit some of them, namely the noble Slime, are pretty great.

I am from South Oxfordshire, which is something I generally manage to disguise by being militant about which bit of London it is best to live in. However, every now and then something will flag up my yokel origins, the most striking being the seemingly inexplicable tendency of barpeople to, when I ask for a soda and lime, hand me a mysterious pint of Strongbow which some fool has placed lime cordial into. In some situations, this is …well, not per se acceptable but something deeply British in me assumes it must be my fault somehow and drinks the pint before trying ‘diet coke’ as a phrase next time. There are, however, some situations where this is not a viable option, for instance when on prescription druqks that do not mix with lovely (or borderline-undrinkable) bouze or when handling heavy machinery, etc. which leads to me being in a permanent state of fear regarding what on earth the barperson is going to come up with. more »

Hazel in Pumpkin Publog • 5 Comments

The age of consent

One of the unfortunate results of having grown up in a world where MySpace existed while I was still underage* is that my previous internet selves occasionally rear their ugly heads and bite me. I had the revelation several years ago that I ought to delete my fifteen-year-old self’s livejournal but while looking for something else, I accidentally stumbled across my rockist seventeen-year-old avatar resolving that I had better stop watching The Hits all day or else I’d “accidentally” start liking McFly. Fortunately, I have no will power.

Nevertheless, by the time I hit the world of internet pervs and weird goth manga, I was of an age where I’d already sufficiently twisted my own brain by buying a Staind album that no further significant damage could occur. My mum can use email and has a Flickr for sharing photos on the SpringWatch feed but she’s never had a MySpace, so there’s no risk of me accidentally finding emo pictures of her on Ancestry.co.uk. That I’m aware of, anyway. more »

Hazel in FT • 7 Comments

New for the health conscious: composted greens

There are a lot of stupid things that supermarkets do to food that upset me. Wrapping cucumbers is of course everyone’s least favourite example of stupidity at work and washing potatoes counts as a close second. Washing carrots unnecessarily, so that the natural stuff that was stopping them drying out is taken off and then putting them in bags wet, so that a vegetable once preservable in the bottom of your fridge for months becomes instantly slimy and moldy is another. Wet things in unventilated bags: they go off. This is not exactly nuclear science, it’s just trufac and also a brilliant way of making slightly fermenting cow feed for the winter. more »

Hazel in FT /Pumpkin Publog • 3 Comments

you shall go to the ball, said the wild things

At some point ages ago I tried to write a thing about comfort pop, after listening to ‘Fight For This Love’ 28674987 million times on repeat but ultimately, saying ‘some songs are quite pappily nice and occasionally necessary to avert a mental breakdown’ is nothing new. There may yet be some distance in the genre, though: I read an article awhile ago about Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ which said that in times of economic strife songs with more uniform beats chart, making the success of such a steady song a major indicator of the recession (as opposed to, y’know, the recession being a major indicator of the recession but nevermind) and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong. Equally, it’s probably not statistically unlikely that the biggest popstar to emerge out of dire times is not some miserabilist twat with a guitar moaning about having to get a real job but a great fairy godmother who calls her devotees ‘little monsters.’ And one of the biggest songs for the last 18-months has been the decades-old ‘Don’t Stop Believin” by hoary rockers Journey- not necessarily because of, since it seemed to be having a slight renaissance before it but certainly in association with a show about losers. more »

Hazel in Do You See /FT • 10 Comments

Hauntography: A School Story

Here is a link to the story, which you might want to read instead of the first 900 words of this and here is a link to a word about our Hauntography project.

Firstly, mostly to get them out of the way, two boring anecdotes.

Semi-irrelevant anecdote #1:
Once when I was working in Waterstones in Oxford, I sold lovely David Mitchell a book of M R James’ ghost stories. The end.

Semi-irrelevant anecdote #2:
I went to a supposedly haunted school. more »

Hazel in The Brown Wedge • 12 Comments

and the hotly fought title of ‘most olive-y olive spread’ goes to

…Tesco’s Finest Greek Olive spread.

I hate Tesco for making terrible, flavourless food and being ten minutes closer to my work than Sainsburys, thus far more likely to be my despondent lunch venue of choice but this is basically like a great big greasy lump of olives on your toast. For the lactose intolerant, it’s bad enough trying to find something with flavour but the awesome fattiness of this is currently ensuring that, after two small slices’ coverage, I find my hair sticking to my forehead with the sheer grotesque quantities of axle lubricant. And by that I definitely don’t mean the repulsive congealed mayonnaise you get in M&S sandwiches, this is more of a serious, industrial undertaking to squash a million delicious olives into one tiny pot of pale paste. It’s like Vitalite FOR MEN.

Truly, my life is very empty. Here is a link to a thing about this delicious thing.

Hazel in FT • 1 Comment