This film follows the ideas and creativity of Patrick Geddes [1854-1932]
To play this short film please click here or on the image above
A Russian doctor – on seeing a sketched image of Patrick Geddes – asked if this was me?
I replied that I share with Patrick Geddes his initials, and this vocation:
Fiction had disrupted reality
Sancho Panza recalls –
that a Russian doctor
mistook Peter to be
Patrick Geddes.
Sancho Panza recalls –
that the gardener who practised medicine and now plants trees
mistook the Russian doctor
to be Don Quixote.
With more errors made than atoms in the sun
all agreed that
fiction had disrupted reality.
Music credits for this film:
[1] Julie Fowlis singing [Proms 2018]
[2] A live acoustic version of ‘Where did all the love go’ by Kasabian
Explanatory footnotes to this film [ kind of Nabokovian]:
(1) I sometime dream about meeting Patrick Geddes. After a day nattering in the garden, Robert Louis Stevenson joins us.
(2) In this film there is a photograph of Patrick Geddes standing outside the Canongate Kirk with a younger generation of Edinburgh folk. Where Patrick Geddes stands there is now a statue to the poet Robert Fergusson. When I am back in Edinburgh [the city of my birth] I eat my sandwiches at this very spot.
[3] This film juxtaposes the work by Geddes on biology [under the microscope] with the outlook tower [under the sky]
[4] ‘The Book of Summer’ – some of my better films are about summer.
[5] An abrupt, and unexpected transition: KASABIAN arrive! [As a family, arriving home after a wonderful summer holiday, we gathered our luggage alongside KASABIAN]
[6] LOST farm is in Strathdon. It has been home to the GORDONs for centuries. It seems that my Gordon family is a scion of LOST.
[7] Some years later. On the day after the ‘5 mile lockdown’ restriction was removed [Covid-19 pandemic] I travelled to East Lothian to meet with the Ormiston Yew. Before reaching this ancient, but still living tree, I followed mile-after-mile a GEDDES lorry.