It's Friday 14th August 2026, I'm writing this in my little music studio at the end of my garden (aren't I lucky!)
The reason I'm sharing the date with you is that it's Go Kid Music's 11th birthday today, and I'm celebrating the best way I know, by releasing a brand new single and music video!
Outside my window I can see huge banana plants, and a jungle that I've been working on for a couple of years - I like to pretend I'm in the Bahamas while I write my songs…well, that's easy to do in these temperatures!
Over the last few years, I've had all kinds of animal visitors to my little garden, so much so that it inspired my song. The video is amy home video clips of all the animals, birds and insects that I've encountered on my daily commute to the end of garden!
We discovered a squirrel enjoyed running across the rooftops of our terrace, and one year low-and-behold, she moved into the rafters and had two babies! This year she came back and had four! It has been hilarious watching them peeping out of the little hole! They learned to sit in the gutter and their little pipe-cleaner tails hung down the back of it in a row! So cute! They drove my two cats to absolute distraction!
They eventually moved out in a daring “Follow my Leader” style game where their mum kept showing them the way to climb down, while they chased each other and wobbled around impossibly on the roof tiles! Well, they made it eventually! One lives in the tree in the garden behind mine and is still a regular visitor.
Nextdoor we have the WILDEST garden I've ever come across! Totally re-wilded to the point of wilderness! I used to stare at it while I had my coffee on the deck in front of my studio, and tut and shake my middle-class-neighbour head. But one day I saw a sight that stopped me in my arrogant tracks! A beautiful fox staring back at me, totally still.
“Oh God! Is it going to eat me?” I thought, then I realised it was way more scared to see me staring back! I lowered my gaze, looked away and quietly ignored it, soon after I heard some snuffling and rustling and ventured a peep over the fence - there was the cutest pair of fox cubs tumbling around in the long grass!
As you'll see in my video…they were just the tip of the family ice-burg!
I've come to love my neighbour's forgotten garden, it's a perfect sanctuary for foxes, hedgehogs, birds, mice and goodness knows who else!
Shortly after, I lost a beach shoe that had been drying in the sun; I had a sock stolen from the washing line and chewed to smithereens; we could hear nothing but fox noises all night for months..! The next time I looked over the fence, the foxes were nowhere to be seen, but a pile of children's school jumpers (4 to be exact!!) littered the garden, along with chewed cuddly toys and all kinds of wrappers and rubbish they had been collecting!
I could imagine the poor parents of those kids telling them off for loosing yet another school jumper, when they simply left it in the garden and a cheeky foxy thief had it away!
As I live in Brighton, Seagulls are a regular part of daily life. They take over our rooftops for most of the year and have a habit of making their nests so precarious that the chicks simply tumble off and cause havock in the streets!
I rescued both my resident seagulls (Sammy and Sally come back every year) chicks this year - one from outside my house, running around in the road, and one just turned up in my garden!
And having sung about hedgehogs for years, I finally had a hedgehog visitor a few weeks ago! They've probably been here all along, but I was out at 1am putting the baby seagull back on the roof again (they kept blowing off!) -and there she was!
Pure joy! That's what my garden and all the creatures bring me!
I don't even really do anything to entice them in, I have a bird feeder, put shallow bowls of water around the garden - and of course make sure theres a gap in the fence so they can get in and out - the Hedgehog Highway.
I was so amazed at how nature just always seems to find a way; my neighbour's crazy garden, a hole in the eaves of the roof, gaps in the paving where flowers push through, daisies and dandilions that appear everywhere. If we leave it alone, it just seems to do it's thing - and it's had to put up with so much from us building houses, paving over all our gardens to make stupid driveways for our stupid cars!
I vow never to build a driveway in my front garden, we have a swarm of bees that return at the end of the summer every year and burrow into the grass. It's their garden, not mine! I could never make them homeless.
So treasure your wild visitors and make them welcome! They've never needed us more than now.
I hope you enjoy my video and the song is available on all (horrible) streaming platforms for no money whatsoever…While you're there, if you love nature even half as much as I do, check out my two previous videos and songs I wrote with children from Woodlands Meed college and school - they LOVE the woods!
Happy Summer to you - Happy Birthday, Go Kid Music xxxx
