A Windmill for Brixton

It was a bright sunny Sunday, a perfect day for a walk. In London, good weather is like a sliced apple: it must be savoured before it goes bad. I decided to walk south from my flat, to a place I had not yet ventured. From a colleague, I learned there was an old windmill nearby. Apparently, it was still intact. In an area prone to governmental neglect I was sceptical anything historical is left to rot. I wanted to investigate.

I cut down a side street, and reached the entrance to a small parkette hemmed in by squat, two-storey housing projects and an iron fence. Beyond is the Brixton prison. Children yelled and screamed as they played on the climbing sets. On the other side of the parkette, through the trees, I saw the windmill: it was a tall black cone with four wooden paddles affixed to the front. The sun was low and very yellow; the shadow of the windmill was like an enormous sundial. It is striking to see such a structure in an area filled with tire stores, chip shops, gas stations, dodgy bars, and storage yards.



I walked closer to the windmill and snapped several photos. As I turned to leave, I saw a man walking along the concrete path. We smiled at each other and he asked if I was interested in the Windmill. He explained that he was part of a group that was trying to restore the windmill into working order.

“This is the oldest building in Brixton,” he said. “Not many people know that. We are tying to save it.”

Irish Quakers built the windmill in 1816. There were twelve such “tower mills” nearby until the railway came and transformed Brixton from farmland and mudflats into Victorian suburbs (now housing projects). All that remains of that time is this small square patch of green.

“They say that Queen Elizabeth I used to come here and stay at a cottage nearby,” he says, pointing over a tall graffiti covered wall.

He explained the insides are an intricate layout of ingenious machinery. Using a mix of cast-iron and wooden parts, this 170-year-old contraption lets the wind turn the mills and crush wheat to make flour for bread. Most of the mechanics are still intact, albeit unused.

“It is an architectural wonder, a historical wonder, an engineering wonder,” he says. “And a spiritual wonder.”

“A spiritual wonder?”

“Yes. I believe this is a blessed space. The wind has great powers and that energy is stored here. Just imagine: it can turn wind into bread. I think it can transform this area -- if we let it. We want to make it work again, make flour and build a bakery and teach children how to make bread.”

I looked up at the windmill. The sun was strong and I had to squint my eyes as he explained more about his plan. I had never really looked at windmill in that way before.

“Windmills are like people,” he says. “Like us, they need air to live. Windmills also represent the basics of life. The grinding of seed is the source of life itself. It goes back thousands and thousands of years. It is the most basic element: to make bread. It is part of us."

We shook hands and he walked away. I consider myself lucky to randomly meet a quasi windmill prophet. I stayed a while longer staring at the windmill. There was a slight breeze. The bare wooden limbs of the mill remained quiet. It will take more than a stiff breeze to make spin again.

TV News

Brian Kelly filming the 10 Downing Street Protest.

What is it like producing TV news in a foreign bureau ? Life revolves around events. We sit by the computer with a program called iNews open at all times. iNews aggregates all the wire services into one location. Reporters from all over the world feed their stories an accounts into this clearing-house of information. For example, if there is a bombing in Iraq, a buzzer will go off and a bulletin will appear on screen. The first reports are usually only two lines of information: "ARAFAT IS DEAD – REPORTS ISRAELI TELEVISION." And we also get the lottery numbers, weather, murders in Holland, gas prices in Nigera, court rulings in the US, UN appointments, and financial market updates.

As the day goes on, these two-line stories begin to grow and grow as more information becomes available. For example, the news of Arafat’s death suddenly becomes a paragraph of copy. An hour later an entire story appears. Then another. Sometimes you will see these reports reprinted verbatim in your newspaper – just look for the names associated press or reuters, etc.

Here at the office we wait for events to arrive like cattle waiting for the farmer to put a bale of hay into our pens. The juicier the story, the more we are satisfied, the faster, harder we work. With the first tidbits of new information we go into action. If the news is breaking in London we dispatch a reporter and a cameraperson to the scene to gather images, report the interviews. If the news happens in another country like Iraq, we rely on syndicated video feeds. Local Iraqi cameramen will videotape the latest bombing and then send their pictures via satellite to newsrooms across the globe and we will rebroadcast their work or incorporate bits of it into our own story.

We are also always on the hunt for “experts.” We, as journalists, are not allowed to express our own opinions; we must simply collect the opinions of others in a balanced way and present them. That means making dozens of calls throughout the city to find someone – sometimes anyone – who knows about Iraq or Islam and get them to comment. We then pray that they are articulate, sane, and have a face for television – not radio!

As deadline approaches you run to your desk. You run to the bathroom. Your sentences drop non-essential words. Courtesy is edited out for brevity and brutal honesty.

The editors will splice the images together on the computer; the reporter writes a script and reads it into a microphone. The audio and the video are then mixed and you have a news report. We send it via fire optic cable to Toronto where it is added to the local broadcasts.

As all this information passes through my brain each day; I pick up random facts and statistics from far away places. For example, I know the magnitude of the earthquake that just hit Japan. I know that Putin and Burlesconi were meeting in Moscow when Bush was re-elected. The new Canadian submarines run on Air Independent Propulsion…

But I still forget my keys. I can’t remember the names of half the people I meet.

When I talk with strangers or people who don’t spend their day with their noses in the headlines, I feel like a walking television – spitting out facts and re-hashed arguments that blend the voices of "talking heads" and experts.


Azeb Wolde-Giorghis at Downing Street Protest

But does it all really matter?

For example, I realize the possible pullout of French troops from Cote D’Ivoire is not a life or death issue for the guys watching Manchester play at the pub near my flat. Today we went to film and a protest outside 10 Downing Street to talk with irate Ivorians (see reporter Azeb in the photos). Although they were shouting and vowing to fight until they’ve shed every last drop of blood, tourists were filming them on camcorders as if the demonstration was the latest hit musical.

The world moves on two levels: the one you can see with your own eyes and ears, and the one you see and hear about through someone else’s eyes and ears. As the distance increases you care less and less to the point of numbness. These facts and figures, names and places become matters of trivia, things you remember at a cocktail party. An explosion that draws blood in one neighborhood is a dull thud on the other side of the world – most people in this world do not know what a real explosion is. Therefore news is a spectator sport. A live trivia quiz, a live history lesson. As an onlooker you can switch it off. But if you are a participant, the statistics are your reality, it is your neighborhood. Even though TV brings together the “tele” and “vision” in a single word, it cannot necessarily fuse them into a meaningful reality.

Nomad Films

I've been working at Nomad Films, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

www.nomadfilms.ca