Diarmuid Gavin

Welcome to the very first episode of 6 Photographs.

My guest today is Diarmuid Gavin. Diarmuid is a garden designer, a TV personality, and a podcaster. He's created nine gardens at the Chelsea floor show between 1995 and 2016, as well as presenting it on several occasions.  and he is also written our co-written over 20 gardening books with the latest one Gardening Together, going to number one in the bestseller chart, we started with a quick photo shoot, and then we sat down to talk.

Diarmuid talked about a lot of things including; The Chelsea Flower Show, Terence Conran, Alan Titchmarsh, John Major, Monie Begley, Noelle Campbell-Sharp, Terry Keane, Stephen O'Leary, and more.

Photograph #1. Dad  01:29
Photograph #2. Terence Conran  04:47
Photograph #3. Monie Begley  10:25
Photograph #4. Chelsea Gold  14:11
Photograph #5. Noelle Campbell-Sharp  21:24
Photograph #6. Diarmuid's Garden  26:17

You can see the photographs we're talking about by clicking on this link:
6 Photographs Podcast

Diarmuid's Instagram page is @diarmuidgavin

His current best selling book, with my lovely cover photograph (and more inside) is Gardening Together

The potter he speaks of is Stephen O'Leary at Fermoyle Pottery

The Artist Retreat he speaks about is Cil Rialaig Arts Centre

Thank you for listening and please subscribe (it's free) so you'll be first to get all the new episodes.

To see all the images we've talked about during the pod, please have a look on 6 Photographs page here

My Website is marknixon.com

Contact: studio@marknixon.com

Follow me on Instagram @marknixonstudio

Or for my Burning Man photos on Instagram @burningmarknixon

Facebook @marknixonstudio

Transcript

Welcome to the very first episode of six photographs. My guest today is Diarmuid Gavin. Diarmuid is a garden designer, a TV personality, and a podcaster. He's created nine gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show between 1995 and 2016, as well as presenting it on several occasions.  and he is also written or co-written 17 gardening books with the latest one Gardening Together, going to number one in the bestseller chart, we started with a quick photo shoot, and then we sat down to talk.

You can see the photographs we're talking about by clicking on the link in the show notes, or by going to marknixon.com/podcast, I'll be posting a photograph from the shoot we just did. And some other ones too. So have a look at those. If you're interested. Now off we go. Great thing is though it's not live, so yes, I could just cut out all my mistakes.

 Oh, or mine  

yours usually fine. Listen, thanks a million for doing this.  You have no idea how much I 

appreciate. Oh, no problem at all. I'm delighted. I thought your email was fantastic. The challenge I had was I, carry around my iPad. I do everything on my. Yeah. I carry around with me and there's over 200,000 photographs every day now.

It's yeah, it's just part of the culture, isn't it? Yeah. 

And that's the problem? Just organizing them. Yeah. I would say take plenty of photographs, print the best ones and frame the priceless ones. That way you'll have them forever. Now Diarmuid, this is a sepia toned black and white photograph. That looks like a still from an old Italian movie.

It's of a young man, maybe mid twenties. sitting on a boat that looks somewhere like Lake Como. It's a sunny day with the light coming from behind the sun is glistering off the tips of the waves. And also reflecting off the sails and the deck, which gives a nice, soft light to his face. He's very smartly dressed, wearing a stiff colored white shirt, a large check tie.

A light tone jacket with a pen clipped in the breast pocket and gold rimmed sunglasses. He's leaning slightly forward with one hand on the rudder and looking past the camera to where he is steering the boat. So who's 

this, there's a really quite extraordinary for me because I'm seeing it on a big screen.

And I've only seen it as when I found this photograph. It was tiny. Yeah. As they would've been printed back in those days. And it was when he passed. In the few days after dad passed, because it's dad, we're looking at that. I found it in the attic at the family home. So it's dad. Young carefree, maybe? It's not in Italy.

It's in Southport.  in London. On a little, on a little trip in pretty much a village pond. It's really quite a quite story. And I found that there's another picture like this. And I posted it. I think one stage on Instagram and somebody absolutely identified from a bridge that was in the background where it was, but it is extraordinary.

He was very good looking very stylish with his, what they look like Raybans. So they, yeah. Uh, he could. Taking the rudder and yeah, that was, he had a tough life, but you wouldn't know it from that. He was highly intelligent, highly cultured, but he had issues with depression and drink and all of that. And they ruled his later life.

So that shows somebody who was young and you know. Could you say he was happy from. I dunno if you could, it's hard to tell, but certainly he does look like a movie, sir. Yeah. And I'm a lot scruffier. When did he die?  

He died probably I'm really bad at dates, but about 10 years ago, maybe 12 years ago at the age of 79, which was a remarkable age for him.

Yeah. Really remarkable age for cause his health wouldn't have been great. So he did well on those terms to last that long. He left school when he was 14, worked in the GPO with Bono's dad and Bono's uncle. And funny enough, they were all into opera at the time. Yeah. These young lads, which was which I found really quite extraordinary.

Yeah. And then became very high in national post office exams. I think forth in the country or something like that and put himself through college at night. So he worked very hard, but his big thing was opera. Uh, and he was an opera buff and he used to write, he, he worked during the day as a personnel manager and at night he used write scripts for a guy called Bob Gallaco who was on Radio Nova, who was a popular DJ, but also did programs about opera.

And dad would write these strips and send them in and they would be used on the great, the program. That's Dad

This photograph is of a group of five people it's taken outside in a gateway with a tower in the background with unusually shaped trees, four people. I know, there's you, another guy with a beard.

there's Philip Treacy, Orla Kiely and sitting in a wheelchair in front the late Terence Conran. 

So this is at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2016, and it's a photograph taken by Vicky Conran Terrence's wife. It, people were coming to visit the garden we had created there. So the topary trees are the kind of Alice in Wonderland.

It was a different type of garden for me, quite twee. And it was a clockwork, uh, garden. And in the background, just over my shoulder, See a musician from the, uh, string quartet. And they were playing in an English country garden. Every time they would play at the garden would move. So topary trees would twirl around and box balls would bob up and down.

And the roof came off the building and this was press day when visitors are allowed to come. The guy with the beard is a guy called Paul Gallagher from Donegal and he is a company called Zap Architects. And he had helped me create the garden because there was a huge amount of engineering underground, of course.

But what I love about this was first of all, the fact that it's Irish design because Orla Kiely, who's this amazing dress designer and accessories designer. Yes. And Philip Treacy, who was always a huge inspiration to me. Who's the milliner who makes the most extraordinary hats that are just sculpture.

 And I don't know him well, and I don't know Orla well. I know them to meet them at times like this, parties at the embassy or whatever. Yeah. You might run into them, but it may have been the last time I saw Terence and Terence when I moved to London was this extraordinary designer, a post-war designer and bon viveur who had maybe 16 restaurants in London.

Some of them absolutely huge he had things like the Conran shop. He would've set up Habitat and sold it. He set up Mothercare and he had this amazing, extraordinary life. And he, took me under his wing. He took a shine to me. I don't know why. And he was very good to me. And we wrote two books together and we did a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show and we used party together and got to restaurants together.

And I think he had a fairly complicated relationship with his own kids and he always treated me like an uncomplicated son. Yeah. And I  never got over the fact that I had access to him. Yeah. And that we would go to lunch or we'd go to dinner and we'd just have fun. Or he came over to Dublin to open my office in, in Dublin and smoking his cigars and anything I wanted done on a television show and his back

wasn't great.  and Vicky, and I think his driver wheeled him in to come and see the garden. And yeah, he withdrew a little bit after, after that. And I remember writing to Vicky to say, could I come and see him? But it was just before COVID so we couldn't make any arrangement. And then he passed, which was incredibly sad.

He was an amazing guy. I think maybe, probably like a lot of designers, not the easiest guy to have as a parent or to be married to her or whatever. I heard this great story about him from my mother-in-law. She was at, she was going to some lunch in Dublin and she was put sitting beside Terence's son, Jasper.

Who's a really brilliant the designer. And I think now takes the helm of the family firm. And she said, this is really funny Jasper because about three months ago, I sat beside your mom at a lunch and a month ago, I sat beside your dad at another lunch and Jasper's mom had been Shirley Conran. And Jasper said, oh, and where they horrendous  and Terry said yes

And the  those stories I've heard about them all were, uh, amazing. And I remember Terence says 80th birthday party, and it was extraordinary. It was his house in the country called Barton Court and everybody who you've. thought of was there. And we were sitting with the family and Jasper had commissioned a mini opera, which was just brilliant to be, and I'd never seen anything like this fireworks lasted for about 20 minutes and to be sitting with the family at that stage and to understand the connection that we really had was just an amazing privilege and to get to time, to spend time with Terence and talk to him about design.

And he was. He'd founded the Design Museum in London and he gave tens of millions of pounds to it and moving it to the, what was the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, his commitment and passion, and going to see an exhibition and finding one of my books at an exhibition of his life was just amazing.

So, but this is joyous because it was a life well lived and he believed that good design enhanced people's lives. And I think he was right. Yeah, brilliant. This is fun because you're clicking on these. I don't know what picture you're going to  click on next  and it's like my life in the front of me. 

Yeah. This one.

This is a photograph of three generations of women, an older woman wearing black rim glasses with a cream colored scarf draped over one shoulder, holding a cigarette who looks like a character, a younger woman in a sleeveless mushroom dress. With black tied belt and your daughter Eppie making jazz hands in the front.

in a sleeveless dress. They're standing outside a fairly grand entrance with stone steps and pillars. So what's 

the occasion. So it's in Roundwood and County Wicklow and we're outside of Luggala, which was Gareth De Brun's the Guinness house. Yeah. Which is in this most extraordinary location. My mother-in-law was a friend of Gareth

my mother-in-law was a journalist Terry Keane, and she was also a friend of this lady from New York Monie Begley and she had met Monie Begley probably in Garret's house. Oh, Yeah, a couple of generations before when Monie came over as freshly graduated from university to write a book about ramblings in Ireland, and she ended up not being here just for a month as she expected, but she lived in Garret house, at Luggala for about a year.

So this is my wife, Justine, Eppie, and Monie and Monie was over on a visit from New York and she was staying.  she stayed between pretty much castles . So she had been staying in Garret's house. Yeah. And we went up to collect her and to say hello to Garret who Justine would've known from when she was growing up.

and to bring her down to another castle in Shankill, that Mark Cochran, Lord Cochran. Who? Yeah, Mark Cochran. Would've been from the Cantell and Cochran family.  The C&C. Oh yeah. And he's married to, uh, Lebanese princess, I think. And certainly Mark's mother was a Lebanese princess. So Monie is extraordinary, lives up on the upper east side.

In New York. We always stay with her when we go to New York, which we haven't done because of COVID for years, her daughter's school friend, is Lady Gaga and Lady Gaga used to have sleepovers only on the pretence of knowing that she could escape from Monie's house and go to a club in the middle of the night  without her parents knowing and Monie knows everybody.

So if you go to New York from Woody Allen to Trump, to absolutely everybody in the city and you'd go out and party hard with her

and what is it in an apartment she lives in, or?

She lives in an apartment. She lives in a ground floor apartment. And it's amazing. Cause she has this kind of out onto the street.

She has this brass grill so that her front door can be left open, but nobody can come in because it's this. So you have all the sounds of the city out there and she has it's big enough apartment on the ground for, so you really get that feeling of New York and it's yeah, an amazing privilege getting to spend time with her.

The fun of her, because it's all about the stories and it's all about good living. And she was also, she was publicist for Madison Square Gardens. So she knew everybody who came to play from Elton to whoever right thru the years in Madison Square Gardens. And then she moved on to be publicist for the Forbes family and their magazines.

Some Malcolm Forbes who was billionaire. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. Candy. And then I remember being another night and whoever from the Forbes family was, texting her or whatever, whoever owned the magazines, because he was about to meet Bono because Bono had become a shareholder in the magazines. 

Yeah. 

 And saying, what should I do? And what's he like? And what I, and Monie replied ,"look, you've no  need to worry. He's Irish just like me. You'll be fine". 

Great. So this next photograph is of you with two other people sitting outside with lots of greenery in the background.  sitting on what looks like a garden bench, but you're all wearing seat belts and laughing.

I don't know the woman, but the other man is the former British Prime M inister. John Major. So where's this one. 

So it's at the Chelsea Flower Show and we're on a Lutyens bench, which is a Edwardian kind of style bench, but we're in a very interesting structure. I'm wearing a jacket, John Major's wearing a suit and the lady is all dressed up in a suit too.

So it's a formal occaison and we're all wearing kind of Ryanair belts kind of thing. So it's really weird. And what it is, part of a garden. I created at the Chelsea Flower Show in maybe 2011. I think it was, and it was an element of it flew up into the sky. So I wanted to build a flying garden. So it was a pavilion on the ground and you'd walk into the pavilion and it had these benches, two benches opposite at each other.

And when you were sat down on the bench and when you put the self safety belt on it rose into the air. 

Yeah.

And it was a hanging basket in a way, cuz it's a garden in itself and it was an extraordinary thing to get to do in the middle of very busy part of London. The lady in the middle is Mrs Titchmarch  Alan Titchmarsh's wife.

Yeah. 

And. The funny thing was the BBC wouldn't let Alan go in this because they wouldn't insure him to go up. And she said, "they're not stopping me". And so she flew up and a day later, the BBC got insurance for Alan to go in my garden. It was ridiculous. 

That is ridiculous. Yeah.

And crazy. And. That week was probably a week of relief.

We'd got this thing made people had allowed us to fly it everybody was talking about, and it was an extraordinary thing to get to do in London. And you're the center of whatever's happening in London that week. So just a time and a place and Chelsea is very important to me. I've done lots of gardens down there through the years and always try to do something different.

Yeah. 

And that's certainly different, but everybody looks happy. 

You, you won the gold medal for that one, didn't you? 

Yes, yes I did. But it's very easy to win a gold medal to The Chelsea Flower Show,  

Really? 

Yeah, very easy, just give them what they want. 

Ah, okay.

What's more difficult is doing something interesting and getting a gold medal and I go so gold me medals are 10, a penny and I've I never bought into that whole culture even the first year before I even did a garden there, I walked around it in 1994.

 And I just thought there's a lot of hype about this. It's not cutting edge design and it's, they're pretending. Yeah. And I still believe that. 

Yeah. 

So the whole metals culture, I've never believed in. And I remember arriving at the garden the morning that the metals had been handed out and all the team there who had helped build a garden that were all having a party

and this was the best thing ever. And I was amazed. At that, because I thought they knew how I felt and whatever about the bloody medals  whatever about what I felt. They were still gonna party and enjoy it and yeah, and whatever, but I, I don't believe in that sort of thing, I believe in doing your best in trying to move things on, in, in design.

But,  you won one for what you wanted to do. 

Yeah. 

So that's 

Yes. 

Not giving them what they want. 

Yeah. And in, in a way,  and it did shut people up because nobody can write a headline saying, Will he get the gold medal? Yeah. This year or whatever, but 

Was it an anti climax? Or just didn't mean anything to begin with or just?

No it was a relief. It was now just shut up.  uh, great. We've got it. And of course I wouldn't turn on it. Then it turned into a big thing. The BBC wanted Alan Titchmarsh to present me to gold medal on air. And I said, it's not gonna happen in a million years. That, and they tricked me a little bit because I, we also won People's Choice.

So, and the following week I went on The One Show,and they presented me with all my awards.  So they made a bloody bigger deal outta it, but anyway, nice to have them and nice that people don't talk about it anymore.  

So how, how much did it cost make something like that? 

£350,000. It's a lot of money. It's a big investment. It would've been. Typical. It was a very big garden because we had to install a crane and hide the crane to lift this part of the garden. But there was a whole other element of the garden on the ground. 

Yeah. 

And actually, I think that's probably what we got the medal for. We got the medal, despite the flying bit.

I'd say bit that I was excited by because people liked the planting, but it's expensive and challenging and a lot of pressure. Yeah, you put a lot into it. You put a lot. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. Everybody puts a lot into it and it is quite a challenge, but great. That occasionally you get to do it. 

What's the most expensive garden you've made.

The most expensive garden we've made would be in the millions. Millions, and millions. Yeah.

I remember once you told me if I remember correctly, you were, you had to helicopter trees into this site in site of France. Yeah, 

we did. Yeah. They had in the, in, in the South Of France, near a place called Eze, there were, we were working on a number of properties on the Côte d'Azur and the weather is very dramatic down there.

And of course the sun is beautiful and weather is glorious place to visit, but when the storms come,it's Incredible  and because the place is so hilly and so rocky often roads will, will be blocked and you have all these mesh screens and nets keeping rocks from falling down 

Sure.

ah the mountain side, but there was one stage. We just got all these really big, expensive plants delivered from Germany and from Belgium and we couldn't move them. And then I saw a helicopter was working for the local authorities, moving boulders off roads, asked the client 

yeah.

to arrange who spoke French and we moved their plants that way.  so it was quite dramatic and incredible to see these people and how the skill 

yeah.

Was just amazing how fast they could do. But there were moving big plants for us, but right into the planting holes. 

Yeah.

Into exactly where we wanted them. Hilarious to be part of it. 

Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, that was a one off.

What was the most expensive tree or plants that you've used. 

We have certainly on occasion bought trees that cost 20,000 euros each, but then also moved them across Europe and plant them.

Yeah.

So you could double that

right

by the time you've moved them into, in, into place. So there are specialist, nurseries, that you can find extraordinary plants in, I suppose there must be in the Americas, but certainly in Europe, they're the ones that I would visit. And because I've been did it so long, I'd have contacts and all those places, and you're always learning and, and whatever.

Now, this one, this photograph of a real character, an older woman sitting in a white hotel dressing gown. With wild, red and blonde hair, wearing white framed sunglasses and holding a glass of champagne. There are four children behind her, three boys and a girl Eppie? Background looks like carved black woods of animals on the wall, and probably a fireplace, which is hidden by the children.

So who is this? 

This is Noelle Campbell-Sharp, and the location is her house in Ballinskelligs in County Kerry. The people are three of her grandchildren who have been brought up in England. So they were home to visit granny then in Kerry. And Eppie who would've been forced to stand beside these smelly boys.  and I'm sure objecting to it hugely.

And it's probably breakfast time. And Noelle has champagne. Noelle is in a Ballyfin dressing gown. I know how she's in that dressing gown. When she was 70, we all got together and gave her a couple of nights in Ballyfin herself and her. Yeah, her daughter as a present. Um, she probably nicked it from there. Uh, she was an incredible business.

woman owned lots of magazines in Dublin, sold them to Robert Maxwell months before he went overboard from his yacht, The Lady Ghislaine. 

oh, yeah. 

And moved down to Kerry and then set up an artists retreat. And her house in Kerry has been my retreat. And indeed, I'm going down to open the exhibition for her next week.

She looks like Vivian Westwood. She has an incredible sense of joie de vivre and style and fun. And we would be quite similar in character, except for the fact that she's a very good business woman, but we're both quite wacky. So even though there's a big age difference, she's a great friend. We get up to all sorts of nonsense together.

Yeah.

So this is Noelle and Eppie would love Noelle because all kids love Noelle, cuz she's just different and Noelle knows everybody. I remember hearing the story of her being at a party, which. What's his name, Andy Warhol, and going up and saying, now draw me something for my niece. And he did. And because she had fashion magazines, she had access to everybody anywhere.

She was a great friend again of my mom in-laws and we would always believe that Ab Fab is based on them, but what they got up to in every capital of the world was worse.  Outrageous. 

Sure. 

And she still continues in. her madcap ways down in Kerry. 

And what about the artists retreats? Have you who's been there that, you know, or 

I think 3000 artists have been there.

So what she did was she found kind of famine village. On a road, the last road in Ireland, looking out over the Skelligs and it's astonishing there and she found these cottages and she did a whole fundraising thing to restore them and artists from all around the world come and that they don't sign any contract and they have no obligation to do anything.

So they come and they say for a week or for a month and they produce work and they  leave, and they will often leave work behind, which is sold in a gallery that she built in the town 

mm-hmm

 and they're artists that could be photographers, they could be writers, often they're painters. But what she has done is bring life back into this community.

And there's potters down there at the moment, the son of one of her helpers down there, a guy called Ger, who actually helped me in my first garden of Chelsea Flower Show. When we were both, probably in our late twenties, his son is now a world renowned potter, making extraordinary plates for Michelin starred restaurants all around the world.

Only because Noelle went there and brought this idea of creativity. She has done extraordinary things. 

What's his name? Do you know? the potter? 

Steven O'Leary and Fermoyle is the pottery and his wife, Alexis, and Alexis went down I think she's from Australia or New Zealand and she would have been Noelle's PA and met Steven who is amazing.

And now have three kids. And they live the good life. They grow their own fruit, vegetables. They bring up the most amazing kids in the wildest, most beautiful part of the world. 

Yeah.

But their stuff is incredible. Six months ago to Sunday Times at a food edition and the only plates they showed were Fermoyle

so to see that, and that's all through something Noelle started. 

Yeah. Brilliant. 

It it's amazing. 

So, this is a very good photograph of your lush garden with your house in the background, you can see your two story, light blue painted metal. What would you call it? Porch? Veranda? 

Veranda. Yeah,

in the background, there's a spiral staircase at one end, linking the ground floor to the first floor.

There's a swing downstairs. And when I was there on the first floor, you'd just put in the bath outside. And this is where we shot your current book 

that's right. Yeah. But not at this time of the year. 

No. And it didn't look like that.

It didn't look like that. Yeah. 

It was, uh, it was getting towards the winter and it was supposed to look like spring.

Yeah.

But we managed to, 

you made it work. You made it work as everywhere I go with that book, people talk about the cover. 

Really?

Yeah. And a cover, really does sell a, a book and it's the second cover Mark that you've done for me. And I've loved both of them. The first was we were up in Powerscourt. 

That's right. 

You shot me against a blue door and it was a brilliant cover.

Absolutely. And it was a little bit rock and roll, which I liked too. And this one, uh, this new book, which is years later was which a friend of mine, Paul Smith is a young gardener and we shot it, I think October and November. 

Yeah, end of Octobler

end of October and how you got anything out of it. When I tell people that it was the end of October, I can't believe it.

Yeah.

So it was in this garden and I wish it had been at this time, well, I don't because it worked out great. Yeah. This is the same place, but at a different time of year and it's cheating, really? Cuz I have to climb up a ladder to get this view. Ah, so it's in my garden in Kilmacanogue in County Wicklow, I bought a kind of concrete block of a house. And because I felt the architecture was so bland and so I'd be allowed to adapt it. And so I found old cast iron pillars built on a veranda and then planted the garden as a jungle would plant that I love and were just seeing them probably last year in spring. So late spring.

So this would've been about mid May. And we have echiums shooting up as spires covered in flowers from a sea of tree ferns, which are just unfurling and it, and we have the dog on the spiral staircase who's rushing down because he's just realized I'm in the garden.  and it's just a jungle and it gives a hint of what's about to come because we've roses  just coming out and it's my retreat and it took me a long time to get it done. But it's getting there now. 

Yeah. Yeah it's great outside space there. Isn't it?. Do you use it much? 

I use it all the time. All the time. It, so it acts we at this time of the year, so we're. Talking just at the end of June, early July.

I, we live out there. So I, my studio, the glass doors are just leading out onto it. So I'm either working from a seat inside or outside. My bath is over here. I use that every day. So every day I have a bath or a shower out there often at five o'clock in the morning. 

Uh, yeah. 

And yeah, we just love it.  Absolutely love it. 

Yeah. Cuz when I first went to your house, it wasn't there. There wasn't really much of a garden or anything? 

No, it took years because I suppose I didn't know what. I should do. I felt like a fraud. I, and your garden has to be Eppie and her friends and every sort of trampolines and slides and everything like that and lawns.

So it's only in the last five years or so that I got to create the garden that, and also it's. Can be expensive to do the type of thing that I wanted to do. Yeah. To do all the building work, to change the windows and everything like that. And after buy the house, I was and remain penniless . So it just, it's all salvage stuff.

The services salvage, the cash on pillars that support the veranda are all salvage and it takes years to achieve what you want. And of course gardens aren't instant. So it's taken 

yeah. 

That amount of time, but, uh, it's beginning to paint a picture that I've wanted to paint. 

Yeah. Brilliant. Did you get the neighbors okay about it when they were going up and 

the, when it was going up, the neighbors were fine or I probably didn't tell them  but the council came. 

Yeah.

And they told me that I needed planning permission. So that stopped all work for a year and a half. 

ugh

 It was the biggest nightmare, but then the architect said, look, if you go to your neighbors, talk to them and see if they'll support it and the neighbors were absolutely brilliant. 

Yeah.

And they said, whatever he's doing, we agree with. And that's how the council gave us permission. And now one of the neighbors in one of the last houses in the end, they've got permission to put on a Veranda too 

brilliant.

Cuz that makes sense. In, in, in this country you can be out looking down over the garden and we have nice views of the Sugar Loaf beyond.

So yeah, no, it's beautiful.  You've been amazing. Thank you so much for being on Six Photographs. 

I really I'm delighted. It's been, uh, a 

special moment.

It's been a real pleasure, Mark. I'm absolutely delighted. And it's funny as I say, it looks as if my life is flashing before  me. So it's been a pleasure.    

 Yeah. Thanks. 

That was brilliant. It really means a lot to me that Diarmuid came and did the podcast. He was so generous with his time. We talked about a lot more than six photographs,so I might think what to do with those sometime in the future. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed it if you did.

And you'd like to leave a review or a five star rating on apple, Google, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this. I'd love you.  now let's see who I can get for number two, talk to you soon. Bye.