Dan McNeil's Blog

Roof Gardening How we turned out back garden from this.. . ... to this... The basics Roof gardening has challenges over and above gardening on the ground. Not only does everything have to be grown in containers, but everything needs to stand on the roof of a building – and don’t forget that the roof of the building may be the floor of your garden but it’s also the ceiling of the people below. We are lucky enough to have some outdoor space with our flat in London, and we’ve spent the past few years turning a couple of empty, flat terraces into lush green gardens. Our front garden is a more traditional roof garden – Mediterranean trees in pots against the wall and a screen of bamboo to shelter delicate plants from the worst of the wind. This garden was already planted to some degree when we moved in, and our work has been to add to what was already there. The back garden was, as you can see from the photo above, literally an empty concret...

Over the years, we've been to loads of TV and radio recordings. There was a time when I was always on the BBC tickets website and going along to TV Centre after work to see a recording. The deal is always that the tickets are free, but that more tickets are given out than there are seats - on the one hand that means there's definitely a full house but on the other hand it means that often there's people in the queue with tickets who don't get in. Our experience in the past was always that the audience team got it about right, and as long as you arrived half an hour or so before then you'd get in. Not so anymore, so it seems. In the past couple of weeks we've arrived in plenty of time (over half an hour before the "admission on site" time on the tickets) for two recordings and not got in to either. Of course, it's just part of the process, but it is quite annoying when it happens twice in quick succession. I wonder why things have changed? I do...