Finding Your Way Back to Your Happy Place
Tom Stuart Smith’s Barn Garden
It’s midnight and I am sat at the kitchen table. I’m not wholly familiar with the editing programme on my computer and I am certainly not fast.
“Are you still in your happy place?” asks my daughter. I’m editing a podcast for her, which needs to be published tomorrow morning. And I am! I really am in my happy place - remembering how much I love editing speech.
From my first vox pop for Radio Merseyside, on a three week work experience stint - I was hooked on editing. The fun of being able to go out and ask people questions and then combine their voices, into a 3 min package or a half hour programme.
Then there’s the sound. Everywhere you go to record has its own unique acoustic. You quickly learn to find quiet spaces without loud ticking clocks or to ask interviewees to remove creaky leather jackets. The ticks, tocks or the creaks being nightmarish to work with when you are editing the voices. But the joy when you capture a sound that paints the picture in our heads, the seagulls in the background of a piece by the coast, or one of my favourites, muffled sounds before I opened a door in the Liverpool Philharmonic Concert Hall, to hear the music of an orchestra rehearsal flood out.
The 3 weeks led to 34 years in the BBC and I gradually moved away from making radio features. So on this podcast journey, just like the editing, I am rediscovering the joy of recording.
Then there are the plants. Liverpool was the first place I had a tiny outdoor space, a miniscule balcony. There was just room for me and a few pots and I loved it. When I moved to London a few years later I took my pots but the new home had communal gardens and I was quickly told residents weren’t allowed to put their pots on the steps. Luckily a lovely lady called Jill, who lived in the ground floor flat below us, saw my plight and allowed me to put my pots outside her bedroom window since she had a small corridor of space. We gardened happily together sharing stories and sherry.
I have continued to sow seeds, nurture seedlings, grow plants throughout my life and I have a small postage stamp, inner city garden which I love. In 2016 I spotted a poster for a Royal Horticultural Society Level 2 evening class in Regents park. I knew that gardens and gardening made me really happy and here was a chance to learn more. Over the next 3 years I studied horticulture at the Regents Park campus of Capel Manor College and gained the qualification and perhaps best of all, met lots of kindred spirits.
So now I am hoping to combine two passions audio and plants. These are the first three recordings, made on my phone in December 2021, that set me on my way this time around.
That’s my husband, sister and brother-in-law. What fascinated me was that when I asked the question – ‘what is your earliest gardening memory’, they were so swiftly able to go back to that place and remember it in such detail.
Those recordings were the beginning of Our Plant Stories podcast journey.
So rather like my 22 year old self I am off on another audio adventure developing a podcast called ‘Our Plant Stories’. I don’t know where it will lead but I’d love for you to join me. There will be stories about plants which I see as the fun bit. There may be struggles with the technology which I see as the challenge. At the end in April 2023 there will be a podcast. All encouragement and support along the way will be gratefully received.
All the content is free and if you like it, do share this blog with a friend so we can build our plant story community ahead of the launch.
Thanks so much for reading and listening.
Sally
ps the ‘happy place’ garden photo was taken by my colleague Laura on a visit we made to Tom Stuart Smith’s Barn Garden.