about JohnH
Sorted, fit. Current activities are photography, hiking, motorbiking, trail biking, music, geology/geoscience, dinner-at-home, travel and more.
Best way to get in touch : 
Rose and Crown, Colombo Street, SE1. Est. 1787, rebuilt 1887.
Christmas drinks with ex- close colleagues, all of us television production engineers. Our jobs were to set up and keep the electronics working in the years before the equipment became reliable. We spent many hours at London Weekend Television working in close proximity behind the scenes on outside broadcasts, radio links and in studios. Together we made television happen..
We’ve been frequenting this Rose and Crown for 45 years or more, even as the skyscrapers grew up around it. These people saw me grow up too, living and loving in and around London in the late Seventies and Eighties; coming in to work on a succession of motorbikes and with a variety of hairstyles, shoulder length to crew-cut. But by now it’s all been said and done, so it’s a pleasure to chat and catch up in the little old pub.
Memorabilia from that part of my career which was in BBC broadcasting. Letters inviting me to jobs, passes, a t-shirt and mugs. The paper mug and pencil come from my time at BBC Radio Bristol as a Vacation Trainee (1976); the Proms passes are when I was no longer BBC Staff, many years later. As freelance as much as staff, I worked on OBs, Studios, Ceefax, Y2k and Technology.
The golden-sleeved LP as background is “50 years of broadcasting” (1972); it features 127 cuts, mostly from BBC Radio, from “Whittle Calling” (1922) to John Snagge’s narration of the funeral of Lord Reith (1971). My favourite, and why I bought the LP as a teenager, is Lieut.-Commander Tommy Woodruffe’s live OB commentary (1937) on the Royal Naval review at Spithead: “The fleet is all lit up”, which he repeats many many times until faded out. One assumes too much at the Wardroom bar. Before my time but its infamy lived on for many years.
- Television Centre 2018
- BBC Television Centre auction - June 2013
- BBC Television Centre: fans queue for tickets
- Pacific Quay, Glasgow - April 2012
- MediaCityUK - May 2011
- Me on LinkedIn
This King of the Pippins on an M27 dwarfing rootstock is one of my first patio fruit trees. It’s been a good and faithful fruiter over a decade or more in a large tub, so it doesn’t dry out. I have a couple of other King of the Pippins but my patio garden in West London needs thinning out so I’m down-potting this dwarfed tree to take it to Keswick; the root-ball is anyhow quite small. My two apple trees in Keswick are growing fine but slowly and I’m not expecting significant crop for a couple of years more yet.
Note the Mandarin fruits on the tree on the left.
Mowing my grass in Keswick, this isn’t really a lawn but the wildflower meadow effect didn’t work either; was it the birds or was it the rabbits which nibbled the flowers?
I’m hoping that will have been the last cut this season. There have been showers and rain all summer keeping everything green and growing. As the nights get longer and the air chilly, growth in the garden has at last slowed down, though there’s still plenty to make tidy. The shrub on the left of this photo with lots of fresh shoots was next for trimming after I’d finished the grass.
Agat safety principles apply of course (all the gear all the time).
Pruning the greengage tree in Terry’s garden in Preston Park, Brighton. This tree’s over fifty years old; the previous gardeners grew it from a stone so there’s no root graft and it’s relatively serene in its growth, especially now it’s in its second half-century. All the more important to keep it in a good shape and not allow it to go straggly.
