Category: Stuff and nonsense

Lot's wife. She looked back didn't she? The sensible way to move forward is to face the front. Yes?

Walking to the car park at Braehead I heard a horn blast and a screech of tyres. I turned round to see what was happening. Like Lot's wife, I looked back. But I kept walking at a brisk pace. Since nothing happened I turned round to face forward. My timing has always been good. Whether it's hitting a dead ball, volleying a high ball, or heading a ball providing I could reach it, the important thing to generate force is to co-ordinate the speed of the projectile and the co-ordinated speed of body and head or foot at the point of impact.

My timing is still good. As I turned round, still walking briskly, the side of my face connected with alarmingly good timing with a large cold, hard, shiny steel lightpost!

##@@**@@##!

My eyebrow, my cheekbone and my jawbone, propelled by my body speed and given added impetus by my head turning to the front, all made a precise and simultaneous connection with the post.

Result? A cut eyebrow that will almost certainly be a black eye in time for sympathetic pastoral comment on Sunday, a bruised cheekbone and a tender jawbone. Oh, and a badly bruised ego

Simon Jones has tagged me for a meme thingy. I don't like memes and only do them to avoid offending very nice people – like Simon – and Brodie – who done this to me last year. So here's the deal. I'll do it but I'm not going to tag another 6. Anyway like Simon I have a limited range of blog-friends and certanly couldn't reach 6 as yet unmemed bloggers.

The rules are

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (Sorry cannae dae that)
5.
Let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their
blog. (Cannae dae this either)
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Now. Six random things about myself…….

1. I once learned to dance the sailor's hornpipe as part of the 1965 Lanark Lanimer Day parade, and our entry (Romance through the Ages) won the whole shebang and I got my name and photo in the Carluke Gazette complete with sailor's uniform and shoulder length hair!! Just so you don't think that was a fluke – I was also a Peer in our school production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe and I can still sing most of the songs – for a credit crunching fee.
2. I have been a lifelong fan of Country & Western Music and have actually listened to and enjoyed Little Jimmy Dickens singing "Sleeping at the foot of the bed", Hank Snow's nasal twang wailing through "Hobo Bill's Last Ride", and some even sadder crooner singing "May the bird of paradise fly up your nose. But I also bought and played till it was unplayable Johnny Cash's San Quentin Live Concert, same singer's Man in Black Album and now enjoy a whole slew of female progressive country artistes but not saying who – except Mary Chapin Carpenter.
3. My first car cost £50, and was a ford anglia which was so rusted it needed two new doors a new bonnet, bootlid and new sills. The bonnet was blue, the boot lid was silver, the sills were black, two doors were brown and the rest of the car was scarlet. It was stolen in Glasgow and I had to give a description to the police who wondered why anyone would bother stealing it – or reporting it stolen!
4. I think a land flowing with Chai Tea Latte would be just as enticing as a land flowing with milk and honey.
5. I am going on Monday to Edinburgh to see the newly discovered Caravaggio of Jesus Calling Peter, as part of the Baroque exhibition. While there I'm having lunch with my daughter, retrieving my car and doing a wee book shop crawl.
6. Against the current cultural stream, and despite much benign and well intentioned persecution, I still like wearing a tie even if I don't have to as part of the traditional power dressing game. Probably says something about my well known insecurity and reserved, perhaps even shy, disposition……..

Promised I wouldn't tag anyone, but I've enjoyed the spur of the moment oddity of doing this.

uox faz –
if you're wondering what that means, it's the result of Gizmo padding
across my keyboard on his way to the kitchen to demand, require, insist
on being fed. Ever since he spent a week in the cattery during our
recebt Cornwall holiday he's been acting like a spoilt feline, alternating between
sychophantic purring and feed me now caterwauling. So I suppose "uox
faz" might be feline-speak for "ban sabbaticals and or holidays".

                        “Uox Faz” –

Feline Haiku for Humans Slow
on the Uptake

 

Walk circumspectly

across the keyboard, touching

just the right keys.

…….

Ban sabbaticals!

when feeders and cuddlers
just

abandon their cat!

…….

"uox faz!" also means,

in feline complaint language,

"Please Stop Stravaigin!”

 

Decided to change the mood and dress style of the blog for the duration of my sabbatical. Don't be misled by the books on the top banner – I'll do my fair share or reading, writing, studying. But there is more to this wonderful life than books, and I'm going looking for it over the next few months. But I DO like the colour, the layout and the sense of lightness just bouncing off the page.

The picture  was taken while on holiday exploring a medieval monastery  and walking across the river using ancient stepping stones.  Amongst the benefits of a sabbatical  will be the chance to regain balance and  be able to  negotiate the stepping stones that are the next stages of life in all its vocational  possibilities. 

When  I did the crossing last year several of the stones were shoogly, moving just enough to remind the unwary or over-confident  pilgrim that  life isn't always free of shoogles!  Recreation, prayer, reading, walking, people, food -  in no order of priority – these are part of daily life, unless they are squeezed out by that over-determined work ethic that Sabbath is meant to interrupt and thus reset life to normal! So these are mostly what I'll be doing a refresher course in! That way I'll cope with the shoogles and nae fa' in. (shoogle is a variation of 'shog' which means 'to wobble from side to side' – 18th century NE of Scotland).

You know these spiral shaped mobiles that are meant to blow in the wind? Like a Chinese lantern, but made of thin polished metal – they're called wind spinners, cos they spin in the wind, ken? They require a wee breeze to make them move – mobiles, you know? And for those who like the sight of light reflected from a spinning metal spiral, one of them hooked to a bracket in the garden will double as a deterrent for most birds – except magpies, pigeons and jackdaws which are the ones most people want to deter.

Well I was in a garden centre today, having a coffee with Graeme, and they had a stand with over a dozen of said mobiles (no not the phones, the spiral things). The stand was about 12 feet from the open air, in a sheltered spot, but the spirals were turning. Explanation. A fan – I kid you not, a fan, was hooked to the top of the stand, pointing down, to make the mobiles turn. Green question – why not move the blessed stand 12 feet and switch off the fan. The breeze – there's always a breeze – would turn the mobiles, and the fan wouldn't contribute to the problems the planet already faces. Mentioned it to an assistant, who shrugged his shoulders with disarming nonchalance, concluded I was more a nuisance than a threat, and sauntered off to see if he could help some more amenable customer.

A fan! An artificial breeze – in Scotland?! To move a mobile??! There are other big fans all over this country whose justification for being a blot in the landscape is that they produce power – to run fans in Garden centres for the most useless purpose I've yet discovered for a fan.

Rant over! But I ask you – a fan……to blow ornaments…..outside…..in Scotland….Hmmmmmmmmm!

Miss Cranston’s Tearoom is one of the more select places of refreshment and consistently  reliable civility as a given of customer service. Located in Gordon Street (a name almost synonymous with civility as those who know me had better testify), in the centre of Glasgow, it’s within a minute’s slow walk from Border’s Bookshop. If you are there at the right time you are shown to a window seat from whence to watch all kinds of people anticipating, transacting or reflecting on their various retail experiences; conversing, arguing or walking along in silence – companionably warm or post-stooshie chill. Sit long enough you see both.

On my recent visit I ordered the individual rhubarb tart and a cafetiere of Blue Mountain coffee. In the discreetly sedate surroundings, sitting at the table with the crisp white cover, and enjoying the joys of refined and leisurely self-indulgence, I discovered the embarrassing problem of the cafetiere with the stuck plunger. I began with a slow even pressure downwards, intending to watch the coarse ground coffee being gently pushed down as the dark brown liquid gathered above. Feeling some resistance I pushed harder, then a little harder, and on the assumption this was an easily overcome technical challenge, a little harder still. The result was an impressive impromptu coffee fountain accompanied by a loud attention drawing clatter of metal on glass. The consequences were neither discreet nor pretty. And within seconds the manager was over, took away the tray, cleaned the table, apologised for the mess (which I’d made), and brought me a fresh and bigger cafetiere of that kind of coffee that makes you aware that not all blessings were lost in the aftermath of the Fall.

As mentioned, Borders is only a minute’s walk away and I was on the hunt for a book for Sheila. Milan Kundera’s elegiac novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a profound narrative reflection of the nature of human choices, which tend to be risks we cannot assess beforehand, guesses at happiness, decisions which all but determine the future. Ah but I wasn’t after Kundera’s considered probing of the human capacity to build, break or endure relationships. I was after a novel with only one word of difference in the title, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall Smith. Holiday reading as a gift. To give a story as a gift is to encourage those we care about to take an inner holiday, the rest and recreation that comes from going someplace else through imaginative literature. In that sense a gift wrapped book is a package holiday.

Not a bad Saturday morning.

Two Cafetiere Disaster Haiku

One

Showing off brute strength,

malfunctioning cafetiere,

coffee eruption.

Two

Coarse ground coffee grain

spews and spreads like speckled mud,

‘I’m that embarrassed!’

You take two modest sized fair trade bananas and place them in a dry  covered pan, skins on. Five minutes gently griddled and the bananas are warm but not cooked. Meanwhile chop almond, hazel and brazil nuts into big chunks and put them in another wee saucepan to gently roast them, and then add a generous helping of maple syrup (a gift from New England friends over for a visit) and turn off the heat.

Nice long desert dish and place a peeled warm banana on each side, a not small scoop of ice cream in between, and then pour over the roasted nuts and maple syrup, and sprinkle with cinnamon.

No idea what it’s called cos it came out of my head – but as preparation for the Euro-Final I had two portions of fruit, some sugar, carbohydrate and protein. Balanced diet, balanced indulgence, eh?

The term whitewash has a long and sometimes ignoble history. At its best it recalls the biblical metaphor for being washed white as snow, and garments washed pure white in the blood of Christ. But it has far less attractive connotations. Poor Stephen Hendry suffered his first snooker whitewash this week at the Sheffield World Snooker Championship – a whole session of 8 frames with no wins. An old friend in Aberdeen recalls his army days when the coal was whitewashed to avoid offending the scrutiny of visiting dignitaries. Gordon Brown attempted the impossible task of whitewashing over the electoral meltdown of last week, and the even impossibler (I know that such a comparative is grammatically impossible, but using it makes it more rhetorically effective) task of whitewashing over the flaws and cracks of a doomed leadership.

Whereas, simple and semantically straightforward blogger that I am, I’ve spent most of the Bank Holiday whitewashing the house. And all that I’m covering up is 6 years of weathering which has made the house an unattractive off-white – so I’m whitewashing it, – well painting it with Dulux dead expensive, all weather, eternally lasting, one coat application stuff. It’ll take a few sessions to do it all – and meanwhile I continue to ruminate on metaphors of clean whiteness, cover-ups, the aesthetic appeal of brilliant white as ethical aspiration, or its ethically dubious flip side of denial of unpleasant political realities.