Journal extracts and pinhole photographs © Kayla Parker 1997

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WINDLESS Wednesday 6th August

Wake early again. At five, gulls fly over squawking, en route to the dump at Chelson Meadow. Another dull damp day. The air is dripping wet. In the garden the leaves vibrate ultra-green. By the next new moon the film will be finished.

A trip to North Cornwall to record the windfarm, in order to do something productive. Near Bodmin steam rises from the forest. A man cycles uphill towards Liskeard, towing a cart with a tent and all his belongings behind him. We slog through heavy traffic and rain to Padstow for Rick Stein's cheese & leek pasties. All the tourists in the area have descended and there is nowhere to park. Lines of tourists in cagoules creep round the quayside like affluent refugees and clog the narrow streets. Stu waits on a double yellow while I sprint off to the deli, dodging gaggles of zombie tourists. I wait ages in the shop while some middle class holiday-makers in front of me simper over the delicacies and spend 36 quid, very slowly, on lemon cheesecake, olives and pâté.

Escape through the drizzle to Delabole. The hawthorn hedges along the lanes have been sculpted by the wind into huge quiffs. An auburn-haired weasel leaps out in front of us and trots across the road. At the windfarm we sit in the car as the windscreen is splattered with raindrops. There's a whisper of a breeze. The vanes of the windmills turn ever so slightly from time to time. We squelch across to a windmill. The only sound is from passing motorbikes, cars and motorhomes. Large black shiny slugs slither over the mown grass. We wait for an hour in case the wind picks up, then drive back home to watch the weather forecast on telly. Further north, part of the A39 has been washed away in the floods and the road is closed. That night the rain stops and we see a bat loop and flutter over the front garden by the light of the street lamp.

CULTURE Thursday 7th August

I have a spasm in my sleep and bite my tongue. The pain wakes me up suddenly. Late in the morning the cloudbase lifts and a watery sun breaks through. Go for a cycle ride up the old rail track to Dartmoor from B&Q car-park. After eight days of rain and no sun it's rank and tropical, overgrown with nettles and brambles. There's a hint of Double Mint from the Wrigley's factory, and the smell of moist chlorophyll, tar and home-made jam. I keep my teeth clenched so I don't swallow any flies, and keep ducking to miss the overhanging branches of sycamore and beech. By the second viaduct the little apple tree has dropped all its leaves, and has hard green apples the size of gobstoppers. On our way back home I spot the lonely cyclist with his cart, pedalling past MacDonald's Drive Thru towards Plympton.

Stuart packs up the car and sets off with Ginny to North Devon and a filming trip to Lundy for Wild Westcountry. Ginny has just spent five days in Barcelona with some glam lesbians. Tomorrow they'll film the Lundy cabbage and some seals. I prepare myself for Plymouth's cultural hi-spot of the year. Tonight is the grand opening of the R.O.Lenkieovicz Retrospective, and three galleries at the Museum have been crammed with the Great One's daubings. Terry Waite is to open the occasion - I think the connection is the Human Condition.

Lesley calls round to escort me. On a fine humid evening we trudge up Saltash hill to town, under the fumey railway bridge, and past the used tampon that's been there for weeks. We cut through the University on our way to the Nowhere for a swift lager to fortify ourselves. But outside Cuba! we spot a crowd of exhibition celebrants, and so dive inside Edmundo's bar instead for refreshment. A little old lady at the bar is Lesley's next-door neighbour from Torpoint, and the grandmother of one of the Lenkieovicz offspring. Mrs Clay has coiled shells of gingery-grey hair pinned in rows down each side of her head. A game old bird who tells Lesley filthy stories while I chat to Joe Wilby - who says he was passed three times through Mên-an-Tol as a baby.

We sit at the open window with John Pollex the potter, gawping at everyone and holding court. Feedback on the opening is that people are queueing for an hour to get in, and it's like a sauna inside. Terry Waite has read a poem that went on for three quarters of an hour, and some of the congregation nearly fainted. We have another Becks and decide not to bother to go.

The sky changes from light grey to dark grey with pink feathers. Then it's night time and Terry Waite turns up, to be greeted at the door by a smiling Edmundo. Ricky, Stefan and Ben swan in and give me big hugs and kisses. Stefan is dressed up like Lord Fauntleroy in a white muslin shirt with stock, and embroidered waistcoat with the bottom button undone. The Artist himself makes an appearance, swathed in black, with his face scrubbed pink and his mane of grey hair brushed. He is led in by Number One Woman Anna. They say hello.

Upstairs there's a rip-roaring party going on with free lager, but we have coffee and sit at our picture window, gazing into the night at the gathering of assorted Lenkieovicz offspring, mistresses and wives outside. Our favourite councillor comes over to say hello and flings her arms around me, bottle in hand. We slobber noisily. She presses her bosoms against me, all soft and furry in her velvet dress. She says 'Brilliant news about START - we must go out for a drink soon!'. Lenkieovicz leaves Cuba!, followed by his youngest, two charming little girls, who run after him in their party dresses, wanting a kiss from Daddy. He keeps them at arm's length and fondles their heads, then presses them dramatically against his crotch like some Old Testament patriarch. Beauty, the Beast, and the two little ones, hold the pose for a few seconds. They all have long hair and wear floaty loose clothes.

STEAMY Friday 8th August

Not much sleep last night. I finally drop off about two. The bloke next door has come back and is banging about. I get up after four, having woken about ten times from that fitful sweaty state of half-sleep. Have a mug of tea, and a cheese and tomato sandwich with stale bread, then go back to sleep about six. Get up again at nine. It's sunny outside, but very humid. I prowl around the back yard attending to my plants. There are over twenty cherry tomatoes now and the morning glory is rampant.

HUNTING STONES Saturday 9th August

We follow the sun West to a massive traffic jam before Indian Queens. Lots of tourists have over-heated and broken down by the roadside. We take nearly an hour to travel five miles. It's hot hot hot. We divert to St Austell, then nearly give up and go home. The thought that it might be cloudy tomorrow keeps us going, so we whizz through the country lanes sing-a-long-a-Prodigy. There are neat rows of leeks, cabbages and carrots in the fields on either side of the road.

At the Land's End we park up down a deserted dirt track near a stone inscribed with an X, and set off with cameras to guess where some obscure holey stones are. We skirt a witchy run-down farm and tramp round the hillside. I have a hunch where the stones might be, but there are no paths. I follow my nose as we squelch through bogs and climb over a rusty iron bedstead laced with barbed wire. It's nearly seven by the time we think we see them on the moor above, but it means wading through waist-high bracken and gorse. My trousers and Stuart's legs get ripped to shreds before we reach the moor. Then we have to break through hurdles of giant spiders' webs laid across a narrow sheep track.

Above us rising out of a sea of purple heather and yellow gorse there are three granite lumps, a round hole drilled in each. The holes are small, but big enough to get your hand through. We shoot Super 8 and pinholes for an hour, avoiding bees and bastard horseflies. As the sun sets the colours become intense. The whole hillside glows mauve and violet with Bell Heather, speckled with white Ling and golden Furze.

At eight we tramp back to the car and speed home by the light of a smiley moon.

LOOKING & SEEING Monday 11th August

I splash out and get Roll 14 processed in an hour by chopper-freak Matt in Fotofirst. Lunch in the Caffeine Club. Arrange with Haydn to drop off tapes there for our Funky Stuff film show on Saturday, then back to Fotofirst. The wiggly night journey pinholes are brilliant, even the night view through the front door has worked. From the Monet dance on telly I get an abstract linear spectrum. Some of the stone holes from Saturday are ok - the view of the setting sun through the first hole is amazing. For most, there's too much sun coming into the pinhole. Book in for a date with Lesley tomorrow for a session in her darkroom.

SHOEBOX Tuesday 12th August

I'm back in my old haunts. Goods yards round the back of buildings with high walls of chain link. Heavy orange twilight dripping rain on cracked-up diesel tarmac. I'm roaming about, a little kid on my own. Investigating. In the wet I find a scatter of cutlery - knives, forks and spoons in Nickel Plated Steel. I try and set fire to the cab of a truck with a wax taper, poking the flame in through the door, but a social worker comes to take me back, holding me firmly by the hand. There are little fires burning all over the deserted wet yard.

The alarm on Wodgee's Discovery goes off early. It's misty outside like looking through muslin. I hear the fog horns sounding on the boats. I remember the silver coins that fell from the pockets of the traveller at Mên-an-Tol when he did handstands. We didn't pick his money up, we left it there on the grass. I think of pennies put over dead people's eyes, blocking the light.

To Lesley's late morning with my shoebox. She transforms her bathroom into a darkroom and I spend the next five hours taking photos in her garden. I unload the photo I took months ago in the back yard. The box camera has been sitting on the settee doing nothing since. The pic is over-exposed but recognizable.

Outside is overcast, I guess the exposure and count to 60 seconds. To photograph myself I lie on the steps and prop my head up on the concrete path. Tiny black frogs the size of my little finger nail hop and stagger about with baby footsteps.By the pond in the conservatory the toadlets are beige suede and as big as my thumb nail. Lesley says they found an adult toad sitting in the middle of a floor cushion in their front room the other night, just like a frog prince. I imagine the toad lying like a human with legs and arms akimbo, watching telly.

For the next few hours I go through the same procedure: cut the paper to size, load the shoebox, take the photo (counting out the guessed exposure), process the picture (counting again). After a while all the counting does my head in so I finish off with some slow-speed colour prints. Then it starts to drizzle so I ring 222222 and go home in a taxi.

LIZARD STONE Thursday 14th August

Sunny morning, a cloud band heading towards Cornwallis by evening. Film the camera obscura in the bedroom. It's a quiet, lazy summer day, nice rich colours, but there's hardly any action in the road outside. We load up and head off for a return visit to the Lizard.

The stone is rough grey granite on the sun side, blotchy lichen on the dark side. The hole is smooth. Sophie, a golden brown goddess with the looks of a young Michael York, says the stone is a powerful fertility force. She's had three kids in three years and daren't go anywhere near it now. Sophie tells fertility tales of friends. A woman who'd had IV treatment for years, then stopped; a year later she crawled through the hole, and the next month she was pregnant. A friend whose partner had cancer - they were told it wasn't possible for her to conceive, but a month after her date with the stone she fell pregnant.

I set up my camera and shoot a whole roll. Views through the hole to the West, and wide shots of the stone from under the trees. I catch two kids with my pinhole, blurry modern ghosts as they perform for the camera.

Then I crawl through the hole with the sun at my back. When I stand up I feel a slow electric zap, like licking a battery, as the charge trickles through my body.

To pass the time in the traffic jam down Trago valley we eat Dutch Ringeloren, the cake with a hole full of red jam. In English, Marimba's: bright yellow coconut swirls on circles of rice paper. Sweet.

SOUNDWAVES Sunday 17th August

By lunchtime an incredible humidity has built up. Coming out of Sainsbury's into the car-park we walk into a wall of hot moisture. There's no wind. We eat the first two cherry tomatoes. They taste very tomatoey.

Evening there's a slight breeze off the sea and the air's a few degrees lower. Head up to the fair on the Hoe, each ride pumping out a different beat. Thriller, It's A Blast!, Sea Storm. Swirls of turquoise and white light, dolphins made of light bulbs, flashing waves of red, yellow, orange and green. The most scary ride, a giant metal drum with people strapped against the wall inside. The circle begins to rise and tilt, spin and turn upside down. Strobe lights flash and everyone screams. There's the smell of sick and beer, and hot-plate onions. We buy a pint each of foaming lager in a giant wax-paper cup, it looks like frothy washing-up water. When it starts to get dark I take pinhole photos, holding the camera above my head, moving it slowly round in a circle on the long exposures.

BADGER WOOD Wednesday 20th August

Logan's doing some extra filming for Wild Westcountry and asks the Forest Ranger if we can tag along. I've never seen a wild badger before. We're warned to wear dark clothes. We meet in the car-park at Cardinham Woods, then drive in convoy to a secret location. Deep in the forest we park up and smear our exposed flesh with insect repellant, then follow our man in single file along a skimpy path up through dense fir trees and bramble. The Ranger has translucent white skin and a pale blond crop; he's dressed in forest green T-shirt and khaki shorts.

We stop near the top of a rise about fifty yards from the sett. We sit on a tree trunk and wait as the forest darkens and gets quiet. Stuart has the DAT recorder ready for action, with the mic propped in the ground and held steady by a bramble branch. Logan lies down a few yards away with his camera primed for action. I draw very quietly for something to do. The Ranger's stomach gurgles.

At eight o'clock, after about half an hour, the first badger leaps out and sniffs the air. Another follows. They groom themselves and then start to explore. The first badger pads up towards us through the scrub and passes about 12 feet away. He stops and stares right at us, before trundling on up the hill like a furry tank. Two more badgers come crashing down the bank opposite us and start wrestling. There are six or seven romping and scampering about, one with only three legs.

We watch them for ages, then it goes quiet again as the badgers begin to forage for food. It's almost dark and the badgers blend into the green and brown background of the forest, so we head back to the cars.

RAINED OFF Thursday 21st August

Waves of thick cloud and rain forecast for the next few days. We brave the traffic and speed to Land's End, stopping off in the drizzle to record the wind. At Chyandour Tesco's I get some carrier bags to wrap up the camera, but as we leave Penzance we are smothered in a blanket of cloud. Montbretia at the roadside burns day-glo orange through the mist. We turn down the track to the inscribed stone by the spooky farm. The same Prodigy track playing again, this time on Radio 1: 'This is dangerous', as the car plunges through pot holes full of water.

We plan a short hike in the light rain up to the moor to film the stones. Because of the mist we can only see about 12 yards, but we know the way. As we're wrapping up the gear, the rain gets heavier. It's wet. There's a rumble of thunder and thick splashing rain. It will be like this for hours, so we turn round and go back. This is our last filming trip for Project. I shoot night time pinholes from the car instead later on. My period's about to start. It's early again.

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